Taste of Saint Louis

On Saturday, we drove downtown and attended the food festival, Taste of Saint Louis. For the past few years, this fair about food fare had relocated out to West County, in Chesterfield. With the completion of the renovation of the Soldiers Memorial, it is now back where it belongs. Vendors are selected from local restaurants and while doing our initial walk through, I was struck by how many of these neighborhoods we haven’t been to for a while. Being out-of-town for three months is the main contributor for this, but I felt the need to revisit them.

We started with a pair of Sambusa from Meskerem Ethiopian Restaurant, one beef and the other lentil. They were both spicy, but good and made me want to checkout again the wide selection of ethnic restaurants along South Grand. We next sampled Chicken teka Masala with rice from Sameem Afghan Restaurant, located in the Grove. The chicken was so tender that you could cut it with a fork. Finally, dessert from Ices Plain & Fancy, located in Tower Grove North. In a twist Anne had their mint chip and I had a Frozen Dude, an adult concoction.

It was a beautiful day, probably the pick day of the weekend. I wish that we could have stayed longer, but time on the parking meter was running out. Feeling comfortably full, we decided that discretion was the better part of valor and left to go home. Too bad, it would have been nice to explore downtown some more. On the way out, Anne stopped to speak with a women’s college soccer team that was in from So-Cal. They had played Mizzou and still had some time to kill before their flight home. I hope that they enjoyed the Taste of Saint Louis as much as we did.