A place that I've heard about many times during my trips to St. Louis over the past few years is a hip little barbecue spot by the name of The Shaved Duck that goes a step beyond many of the traditional barbecue places in "The Loo". I have tried to go there a handful of times, but each time the place was packed with people waiting outside to get into the small restaurant. On a visit to one of my accounts in St. Louis earlier this year, we lucked out and were able to get a table for 4 people around 6:30 on a weeknight. Much to my wife's consternation, as she will be very upset when she reads this, I finally got a chance to try The Shaved Duck.
Alastair Nisbet grew up in Aberdeen on Scotland's north east coast. It's not quite the hot bed of barbecue where one would cut their teeth on smoked briskets, ribs, or pork butt. In his formative years, he worked in restaurants in Scotland. That is, until he was in his early 20's when he met an American woman and eventually moved to the U.S. It was during his first visit to the U.S. where he not only fell in love with the woman, but he also fell in love with barbecue. The first time he tasted pulled pork, he was blown away. It wasn't long after he moved to the States that he bought his first smoker.
Ally - as he was soon known to friends in his new home of St. Louis - knew he wanted to open a restaurant one day, but he needed to save up some money and also get some health insurance since free insurance isn't available for ex-pats from the U.K. He worked in sales for five years before he went to work at a restaurant to learn the ins-and-outs of the business. Within a year, Nisbet had his plan in place to open a Scottish restaurant - his home away from his hometown of Aberdeen. He found a spot in the Central West End of St. Louis and opened The Scottish Arms in 2005. It featured common Scottish and American fare along with a wide selection of imported beers and live music.
(Pictured Right - Alastair "Ally" Nesbit. Photo courtesy Food Talk STL. Click on this link for a wonderful audio/video/print feature on Ally Nisbet and The Scottish Arms.)
A lot of Scottish food is based upon using the land and sea for the best ingredients. French cuisine is similar to Scottish food in terms of using the land for their food. Once "The Arms" was up and going for a couple years, Nisbet turned his attention to a new concept - a restaurant that offered Americanized French (or French American) foods. He teamed with a couple of young chefs to help out with the restaurant and hired a bar manager that brought in an eclectic beer selection. Coming up with a name for the place proved to be a bit of a conundrum. Sitting around trying beers one evening in a group, Nisbet came up with the non-sensical Shaved Duck name. Everyone laughed at the absurdity of the name, but it stuck. The Shaved Duck opened in the spring of 2008 in a building that started out as a neighborhood grocery store, but had most recently been a small restaurant by the name of Pestalozzi Place.
From its start, The Shaved Duck was a hit. Their beer selection was called by one local publication as the best in town. Their butter-poached filet mignon, their duck confit, their curry tagliatelle, and their duck-fat frites (fries) had critics and food enthusiasts in St. Louis dancing in the aisle. Unfortunately, the Great Recession of 2008 affected a lot of restaurants and The Shaved Duck was not immune from the downturn. By the end of the year, Nisbet decided to pull the plug on the concept and regroup.
Barbecue was still a passion for Nisbet and he thought that he could save The Shaved Duck by doing something along the lines of a barbecue place, but with little twists and by keeping some of the more popular menu items from the first incarnation of The Shaved Duck. Nisbet's two chefs and his bar manager didn't agree with the direction of the new concept, so they ended up leaving before he re-opened The Shaved Duck in late January of 2009.
The re-incarnation of The Shaved Duck proved to be the right one for Nisbet. The barbecue, traditional sides and holdovers like the duck confit brought people in the doors in droves. The place was always packed when I went there three or four times in the past. But tonight, we were lucky to get in right away.
We pulled up across from The Shaved Duck located at the corner of Virginia Ave. and Pestalozzi St. in the heart of Tower Grove East in St. Louis. (see map) Going inside, there was a small bar area that sat six people and featured ornate glass windows behind the bar. For being well-known for their craft beer selection, I was sort of taken aback at how small the bar area was.
On the wall near the bar was a mural of significant St. Louis-area musicians over the past 100 years. The Shaved Duck features live music in terms of a solo artist playing in a corner of the bar nearly every night. The night we were there, a musician by the name of Pierce Crask was playing his guitar and singing in the bar.
We were guided to the back area of the restaurant where the small dining area sits at The Shaved Duck. It was pretty cozy in there, but we didn't really feel like the other diners were sitting on top of us.
Our server for the evening, she was calling herself Claire Bear, came by and dropped off menus for us. The current beer list was on a blackboard on the wall. I got myself the Urban Underdog lager from St. Louis' Urban Chestnut brewery. (I also like their Zwickel Bavarian-style lager very much, as well.)
Since my guests had been there before, but I hadn't, we decided to try just a little bit of everything. The only problem was that the first thing we asked for - the duck confit - they were out of it that evening. Claire said that they were out of the baked beans, as well. Well, as long as they weren't out of anything else, that was fine with me.
Since they do a little bit of everything from the South, they had gumbo on the menu. It was served with a dollop of rice on the top along with some chopped green onions. Chunks of seafood and andouille sausage were mixed in with the great tasting broth. Although they said it was made with Habanero and Cascabel chile peppers, I didn't think it was all that spicy. It was simply terrific, one of the better cups of gumbo I've experienced. Frankly, I could have had a bowl of the gumbo and been perfectly content.
One of the guys couldn't quit raving about the walnut and brown sugar bacon appetizer. We got three orders that. They cure their own bacon in-house and topped it off with walnut chunks, brown sugar, and blue cheese crumbles. Sliced pears come on the side. It was very good, indeed, but also very rich.
We also had to get the smothered fries they have on the menu at The Shaved Duck. Those featured crisp hand-cut fries topped with pulled pork meat and a cheese sauce, finished with shredded sharp cheddar cheese. The taste of this plate was rich and decadent. I had a couple three bites of the smothered fries because I knew if I ate more after the gumbo and a couple strips of the candied bacon, I wouldn't want to eat anything else.
One of the things on the appetizer menu was the brisket burnt ends, but I wanted some of those as part of my dinner offering that evening. In addition to burnt ends, they also had smoked chicken, smoked meatloaf, smoked tri-tip, pulled pork and ribs that evening. We all sort of discussed what we were going to get and we said we'd sort of share things family style.
My plate consisted of the burnt ends, tri-tip and three of the pork ribs. The burnt ends were rolled in The Shaved Duck's house-made barbecue sauce. One of the guys said, "Oh, man, we screwed up. I should have told you to get the burnt ends without the sauce." I could see what he meant. The sauce was a sweet and smoky sauce with some vinegar mixed in, I believe. I actually didn't care for it all that much. But the burnt ends were really tender and had a great smoked flavor to them.
The ribs were just so-so, in my opinion. They were a little dry and the rub they used didn't really do much to enhance the taste of the smoked pork ribs. But I will say that the tri-tip was outstanding. Tender, a touch of a smoke flavor to go along with the juiciness of the beef, the tri-tip was worth the price of admission.
One of the guys got the meatloaf on his plate along with the tri-tip and the pulled chicken. I tried some of the meatloaf and it was also pretty good. It was a little dried out, but it had a nice taste quality. I've thought about smoking meatloaf at home, but I just haven't pulled the trigger on that. The meat loaf at The Shaved Duck pretty much convinced me that I had to do it sometime.
The pulled pork was also very good. Moist with a slight smoke flavor, the pulled pork was very tender and easy to cut with a fork. It tasted all right with their barbecue sauce - better than the sauce went with the burnt ends.
The guys were also big on the sides at The Shaved Duck. Since they didn't have baked beans that night, I had to settle for something else. I got the coleslaw which was pretty bland. They had also sold me on getting a side of the jalapeño cream corn for a small side and I didn't think it was all that great. But two other sides that were great were the sautéed Brussels sprouts and the sautéed green beans. I normally don't like Brussels sprouts, but these were pan sautéed in butter and had a nice roasted flavor to them. The green beans were equally surprising - sautéed similar to the Brussels sprouts, they had a crispy outer shell and weren't chewy or overcooked. I was sort of sad I didn't get to try the baked beans, but two of the four sides I tried were excellent.
Unfortunately, we left a lot of food on the table when we were done with the meal. But that was all right. We ordered a lot of food for the four of us. Some things about The Shaved Duck I really liked - the smoked tri-tip and the smoked meatloaf were both outstanding, as were the sautéed Brussels sprouts and the sautéed green beans. And I can't say enough about the cup of seafood and andouille sausage gumbo I had to start out with. I think I was oversold by my guests on the walnut and brown sugar bacon and the smothered fries, as well as the jalapeño cream corn - but they were all still good. I thought the burnt ends would have been better had they not been in the house-made barbecue sauce, and the ribs I thought were just sort of so-so. But the service we had was exemplary, as Claire took care of us very well with every request or add-on that we had. The Shaved Duck has a great reputation for interesting barbecue, but I may have hit them on an off night with their ribs. But if I would have gotten the meat loaf, the tri-tip, and the burnt ends without the barbecue sauce on them - and tried nothing else - then I would be completely in the bag for The Shaved Duck.
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