At Expat BBQ, St. Louis’ most acclaimed chef loses himself in global barbecue
Expat BBQ wants to tell you a story. Imagine an American pitmaster in a foreign country, smoking the expected meats — beef brisket, pork ribs, chicken — but with local seasonings. A high-concept pitch, Hollywood calls it. The name really does say it all.
Because Expat is a new restaurant from Gerard Craft's Niche Food Group, this story demands attention. Craft, of course, is the most acclaimed and influential St. Louis chef of the past 20 years, a James Beard Award-winner at his late original restaurant Niche and the operator of, among others, Brasserie by Niche, Pastaria and Bowood by Niche. He has also helped curate the vendor lineups at the Food Hall at City Foundry and St. Louis City SC's stadium.
Craft debuted Expat in late summer in a multi-level space adjacent to City Foundry's food hall, another big-ticket addition to the blockbuster Midtown development. The restaurant can do only so much with its building's cold, industrial bones, and some of what it does is thuddingly obvious, like the wall of vintage-style travel posters that dominates the main dining room.
Fortunately, the setting leans on whimsy as well as World Market. The restaurant's logo is an elegantly poised tiger. Is she sizing up her next meal or contemplating inviting you to join her and her husband for a drink at the bar? Outside the entrance to the terrace stands Patty, a two-ton concrete sculpture of a pink elephant, complete with a separate stand to attach your phone for selfies.
Expat's dining room and open-air terrace are essentially separate experiences. The dining room (bar included) is open for dinner with the restaurant's full menu and table service. The terrace, which you access via stairs or an elevator, serves lunch and dinner from a condensed version of the menu that features barbecue sandwiches rather than full plates. You order your food at a kiosk, and the kitchen dispatches it in a paper bag to the terrace bar, where it is transferred unceremoniously to a tray.
Expat doesn't look or operate like just another barbecue joint, and the menu from Craft and executive chef Sam Nawrocki promises an equally fresh approach to the food. Here beef brisket is seasoned with a Yucatán spice rub, brushed with chipotles in adobo and served with an avocado salsa verde to apply to taste.
I've copied those details verbatim from the menu. The tale they spin of Mexican influences doesn't translate to the plate, though. This is brisket-flavored brisket — smoky, but lacking chipotle's earthy heat. The Yucatán spice rub is either too nuanced or too sparingly applied to register on so brawny a cut. As brisket, it ranks below the area's best. The bark doesn't bite back. The thick slices are tender enough, but not transportingly luscious.
The brisket raises two questions. Is Expat a workable idea? And why even open a barbecue restaurant in 2024 if you're not aiming to be the best of the best?
The first question is trickier, but less likely to plunge me into existential despair. Craft's track record speaks for itself, and I don't doubt that he, Nawrocki and their team have devoted considerable time to developing these recipes. But while Expat's concept certainly isn't a crass gimmick, the story it's telling doesn't make sense yet.
Consider that brisket again. Ignore the more immediate concerns I mentioned. Instead, imagine our fictional American pitmaster abroad in Mexico — specifically, in Yucatán, where the robust culinary tradition happens to include one of the world's most famous barbecue dishes, cochinita pibil, pork flavored with achiote and sour Seville orange. Yet our pitmaster looks to beef and chipotles in adobo for inspiration.
Expat's pork ribs stagger in the opposite direction from the brisket, delirious in their enthusiasm for Chinese ingredients. The zip of mustard and the pungent, crunchy heat of chili crisp battle for your palate above the gentle, warming sweetness of five-spice seasoning. Only the undeniable porkiness of these meaty ribs scans as barbecue, though. The intensity of the accents swamps any woodsmoke flavor.
A better question than whether Expat's idea can work: Does the restaurant want to accent American barbecue with global ingredients or to explore global cuisines through American barbecue? The menu can't settle on a compelling answer either way.
Pork shoulder marinated with lime, fish sauce, basil, ginger and lychee makes for juicy pulled pork, but its obvious Vietnamese influence shines through only when you pair a piece of the meat with its basil garnish. Chicken rubbed with berbere seasoning and, for the pulled-chicken sandwich, tossed in a prickly awaze sauce doesn't hold back from its Ethiopian influences. Like the pork ribs, though, it obscures the vital touch of smoke.
Sometimes, Expat loses the thread of its argument entirely. Lamb shoulder, seasoned with pomegranate molasses and cardamom, cumin and coriander, among other spices, tastes mainly of the meat itself — with no hint of smoke — and an intense, simplistic tanginess. As a sandwich, the addition of a yogurt-based white barbecue sauce nominally identifies the dish as Afghani lamb shoulder. The Cowboy Burger falls similarly flat, its Korean-inspired garnishes of fried kimchi pickles and a gochugaru barbecue sauce inexplicably bland atop a ho-hum four-ounce beef patty.
That burger is one of a few non-barbecue dishes that fill out the menu and, maybe, act as a hedge against diners not completely sold on Expat's concept. You will also find Brasserie by Niche's beloved Brass Burger and Dia's Cheese Bread, the tapioca starch-based cheese biscuits that were one of the signature dishes at Craft's late Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis restaurant Cellar House. Baked to order there, they were a delight. Delivered promptly after ordering at Expat, they were lukewarm and chewy.
Expat also pulls its punches within the barbecue menu. Among the sides, only the baked black beans deliver an unexpected jolt thanks to the funk and fizz of black vinegar and black bean paste. Smoked jalapeño mac and cheese with mole-poblano breadcrumbs prove as daring as Velveeta shells. The fries are fries — though not, on my visits, the waffle fries on the menu, but regular fries.
Throughout Expat BBQ, you sense the tension of a high-profile restaurant that doesn't know what, exactly, will compel diners and finds itself stuck between the shock of the new and the shrug of the familiar. It isn't the story Expat wants to tell, but it's an unfortunately appropriate one for St. Louis dining as 2024 draws to a close.
Satisfy your cravings With our weekly newsletter packed with the latest in everything food. Restaurant critic
