st. louis house of fine icecream and dessert.

St. Louis House of Fine Ice-cream and Dessert (....or just St. Louis) only just recently came onto my radar after a friend mentioned it to me whilst discussing where to go next for a food adventure. Funnily enough, after that first mention, I started seeing the name being mentioned everywhere.  It's located near the Marquis and just opposite of Ding Hao on Gouger Street.



A friend and I decided (I decided, she came along) to try it out one Sunday night after she had sampled some of their ice-cream and was eager to try more.  We ordered the churros for two, a banana and nut crepe and a pot of tea for two.  Unfortunately there are no pictures of the tea.  It was pretty ordinary though.

Churros for Two (with dark chocolate and milk chocolate sauce)

 

The churros here are a lot thicker than the ones found in other churros places like San Churro and Chocolate Taperia and kind of remind me of okra.  Since I've only ever had the thinner versions I was really looking forward to trying this thick version and seeing how different it would taste.  The outside of the churros was a familiar and welcome taste - the oily crunch of batter topped with cinnamon - while the inside was filled with soft and cakey.  My friend likened it to eating a biscuit, while I thought felt as though I was eating a crunchy donut.  You know how some donuts have that dry, dense texture?  It tasted like that but maybe a little bit softer.  They tasted alright with the chocolate dipping sauces but in the end we couldn't finish all six of them since they were pretty filling as well.

Crepe with banana, nuts, caramel sauce and vanilla ice-cream

My first impression of the crepe was that it looked rather dry and under-presented.  Cutting into the crepe I soon found that it wasn't dry since there was caramel sauce inside of it, but the crepe itself was not as soft as I was expecting.  There's a place called Mother's Crepe on Grote Street which does really soft crepes and I guess I was expecting this one to be the same.  However, this one was a bit too hard for my liking and it didn't melt in my mouth as I thought it would.  The ice-cream wasn't exactly extraordinarily delicious either.  Luckily the caramel sauce, bananas and nuts combination worked really well together and lifted the dish up a little bit.

Opening up a new dessert place brings with it great expectations.  Maybe my expectations were a little bit too high, but St. Louis didn't really do it for me.  I was really happy with how quick the desserts came out and the service was adequate - the waiters were always civil and compliant with our requests - but the actual food wasn't great.  However, I am looking forward to to coming back to try some of their other desserts and hopefully I'll like them more than these two dishes.