Soooo… your intrepid reviewer (god that sounds cool), how about “your insipid reviewer”, has been doing the St. Louis Diner Review for...some time now. Places come and places go and I end up with kind of basic, smug knowledge of where to eat breakfast in St. Louis and always figure, if a place is not pretty new… I have been there. So, it is with some extreme humbleness and embarrassment that I belatedly bring to you a gem, The Carondelet Diner.
When people ask where it is I describe is at south, south, south, south St. Louis. This is in the area I think of as “The Real Confluence” which is not where the Missouri and Mississippi meet but instead where the Mighty River Des Peres disgorges it’s viscous content into the Mississippi. There is a casino there, and some foundries and of course Lemay… on the bad side of River Des Peres. I would like to say the area is in “resurgence” or even worse in “gentryfing” but that would be a lie. Although Carondelet sports some fairly recent additions of note (including “Stacked” and Feraros” on Ivory, there is not a whole lot going on. The place can be found on Davis, two blocks (east/south?) of Broadway at corner of Davis and Reilly..
I felt slightly better when I read this review and realized the place had been shuttered for a long time and was recently (2014) reopened by the Riverside people. That represents a really fine commitment to food.
I went for breakfast on Saturday and immediately saw their white board of weekly specials which will demand a return for lunch.
It is hard to fault a good whiteboard full of specials. This is Comfort food with a kapital K. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes and jack salmon and sometimes catfish and french fries with brown gravy. I might need to move.
The place has nice ambience and definitely feels working class but not in a broke down way. The decoration and design are not opulent but instead veer towards comfortable. Nice booths and spacious tables. No broken furniture. If I were to complain it would be that they do not have a counter where you can watch them cook but you can look back through the open kitchen door and see them working. My waitress was polite and friendly and they had great brewed iced tea. At the tables around me were primarily men, primarily older, at tables with several people and clearly there were some regulars (always a good sign for me) and a lot of polite conversation with no one talking politics or “Brexit” (whatever that is). No one gave me the stink eye when I came in and that is as close anything gets to welcoming at 7:00 A.M. on a Saturday morning.
I perused the menu and saw that they had hash browns instead of the dreaded “breakfast potatoes” which as anyone knows are almost always an unforgivable sin. They served a lot of plates “smothered” with gravy including a burger and breakfast. They also offered a steak n egg breakfast for under 10 bucks and country fried steak which will need to be sampled along with a mess of breakfast sandwiches and omelettes. Food was prepared and fast and served hot. I got the smothered breakfast with only one biscuit (two seemed unhealthy) and it was...awesome. Biscuits were a little heavy but perfect with the gravy which had an accessible amount of spice but allowed me to pepper it up to taste.
I can rate this as a 5 out of 5 Slingers as being worth the trip. Sometimes it pays to drive around parts o town you don't frequent. Get out of your silo and head south for some breakfast!
