Mississippi Half Step |
Mississippi Half Step & Piasa Pub
Our destinations for this set of trips were two Grafton restaurants with distinctly diverse characters. Mississippi Half Step serves steaks, fish and other entrees priced generally in the midteens in a stately late-19th-century home just as you enter town; the Piasa Pub is a decidedly more "pub grub" type of place, where plastic utensils and a river of molten cheese are counterbalanced by an interesting and reasonably long selection of microbrewed and imported beers. Mississippi Half Step - which gets its name in part because it's about a "half step" from the Mississippi River and in part from the title of a Grateful Dead song - is housed in the Charles Brainerd house, a mansion dating to 1885. Owners are James and Carla Newton, and James' parents, Wayne Anne and Charlie, make the restaurant's desserts. The restaurant has an outdoor courtyard facing the River Road, as well as multiple dining spaces on the main floor and in the basement, with a gift shop upstairs. For our visit, we were seated in the basement, which lacks the views of the other rooms but is still made cozy by antique signs and other memorabilia. The menu has eclectic influences, but we found ourselves steering toward Asia with our appetizers of fried spring rolls and crab Rangoon. The Rangoon was much better than what's otherwise usually found in Chinese-American restaurants, overstuffed triangles that weren't overlapped into the more traditional bow shape, with a mixture of cheeses that added a tang to the crab flavor. The spring rolls were cigar-size, fried quickly enough that the julienned vegetables inside retained their crispness. We tried a couple of steaks, a strip and a pepperloin, both nicely prepared, with the former served with a gently piquant bearnaise sauce and the latter well-balanced by sides of crisp green beans and Asiago- and blue-cheese scalloped potatoes. The restaurant touts its catfish as local, but I found the taste, even under blackened seasonings, to be slightly musty. The relatives deserve high praise for their desserts. The blackberry cobbler was remarkable, with very sweet (but, as we were forewarned, still full of seeds) berries and a rich liqueur taste to the underlying sauce, the "cobbler" achieved by a roof of dough like a pie crust. Pecan pie with added chocolate was also very good, although not up to the sublime levels of the cobbler. The wine list is relatively short but value-priced, with glasses from $4 to $7.25 and bottles from $14 to $28. The Grateful Dead theme is reinforced by two choices of J. Garcia, a limited-edition wine produced by Clos du Bois. Folks were dressed in everything from shorts and tank tops to upscale casual at Mississippi Half Step, but T-shirts - and a fair amount of cycling gear, both motorized and pedaled - were pretty much the norm at the Piasa Pub. The restaurant has no pretensions at all to gourmet food, describing itself as "down-home grub." On our visit, this meant starters of Lucy's Cheesy Artichoke Dip for an initial dose of melted-cheese-augmented food, coupled with a pretzel-wrapped sausage from St. Louis stalwart Gus' Pretzel Shop. Next up was more melted cheese, this time yellow, saucing shredded chicken in something called Cheesy Chicken Casserole and in fluffy arrangement with mild taco fillings in Taco Pie. The chicken-breast sandwich avoided the cheese, instead rubbing the breast with chili powder and lime and serving it topped by onions and a moderately spicy jalapeno-lime mayonnaise. They may not be fancy, but the menu items are all pretty much $6 or less and are good fillers after a day of biking, walking the antique shops or hiking nearby Pere Marquette State Park. Against this food backdrop, however, the Piasa Pub had Pilsner Urquell, Leinenkugel's Berry Weiss, some Schlafly's and several other beers on tap - plus a glass-front cooler case full of bottled beers. Unfortunately, the beer list was presented to me orally and somewhat off-the-cuff, leading me to surmise that they'd probably sell a lot more of the more unusual stuff in the cooler if they had a printed beer list readily available. The atmosphere at Piasa Pub, however, is perfect for the riverside location. Multiple decks grow like appendages off the main building, some at street level and glassed-in (with screened windows that can be opened), more outside those windows, and even more outdoors and down a level. If you're planning to take the Grafton Ferry back into St. Charles County as part of your excursion, remember that the last trip leaves the Illinois side at 7:45 p.m. Monday through Thursday. A later dinner time is easier to accommodate on weekends, when the last boat leaves at 9:45 p.m. And even if you miss the boat, the alternative drive back down the River Road is worth it just for the view. Mississippi Half Step 420 East Main Street Grafton, IL 618-786-2722 Menu: Midprice steaks, seafood and pasta, plus homemade desserts. Atmosphere: Lovely vintage-1885 landmark mansion with dining on the main floor, in the basement and on an outdoor patio space. Entree prices: Strip steak, $17.95; catfish $12.95; pepperloin, $20.95. Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Wednesday-Thursday and Sunday; 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Friday-Saturday. Smoking: On the patio Wheelchair access: Good (separate entrance). Wine list: Moderate length, moderate prices (glasses from $4 to $7.25 and bottles from $14 to $28). Food: B+ Atmosphere: A- Service: B (Copyright 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
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