Surely you're joking

By Betha Whitlow - SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH
06/26/2008

Surely you're joking.

As excited as I am about our burgeoning local food scene, had you told me a few months ago that St. Louis would be all over Food and Wine magazine, such "psshaws" would have been my response.

Then came admiring praise of several of our restaurants, followed by the thrilling news that Gerard Craft of Niche had won Food and Wine's award as best new chef. Niche's pastry guru, Matthew Rice, got his own colorful spread in Food and Wine's pages.

Suddenly, people couldn't get enough of Niche. It sometimes felt like you couldn't get a reservation, either.

Thankfully, at Veruca Bakeshop & Cafe, a little piece of the action can be had with no reservation required.

Veruca, next to Niche on the leafiest and most sun-dappled of Benton Park streets, is Rice's daytime venture, where he doles out highbrow riffs on lowbrow desserts for mere pennies and makes you wonder when he ever sleeps.

You can savor a fragrant Tahitian Vanilla latte ($4) and eat in, or do as the food critics do and take a sampling of treats to your man, your lady or your office mates as a potent reminder of why you deserve their love.

Hostess and Little Debbie be warned: With his chocolate snack cake ($2) and peanut butter bar ($2), Rice has not only elbowed onto your turf, but torched it. The chocolate snack cake brings tender chocolate cake laced with sweet, sticky cream filling and wrapped in deep chocolate fondant, while the peanut butter bar, gorgeously salty-sweet, is mouth-melting and crunchy under its chocolate shell.

Rice also has a magical way with cake. He offers his family recipe: red velvet cake ($2) in wax-paper wrapped, sandwich-shaped wedges of a marvelous Southern gothic-red, cocoa-tinged cake lined with rich ribbons of buttercream.

A decidedly feminine-looking strawberry vanilla cupcake ($2) — dense, flawlessly textured yellow cake buried under delicate, strawberry-infused pink frosting — inspired a very masculine friend of mine to assure me that eating them was even better than … well, the obvious.

Yes, Veruca's desserts are really that good, and every one of them is heightened by a dash of Rice's fame — and our local pride.

Food and Wine Magazine doesn't lie. And I kid you not.
 

Last updated: Wednesday, July 02, 2008