I don’t know what you should eat at Milque Toast Bar in Benton Park. I don’t know when you should go there. That’s a problem for me, the restaurant critic. It’s a very good thing for you, the prospective diner, though. It’s a very good thing for Milque Toast, too.
Exclusive insight, news, tips and more on ºüÀêÊÓƵ' thriving dining scene from ºüÀêÊÓƵ restaurant critic Ian Froeb.
You might already know Milque Toast. The restaurant’s original location opened in September 2015 on South Jefferson Avenue just south of Interstate 44 and Russell Boulevard. There are small restaurants, there are tiny restaurants, and then there was Milque Toast 1.0. Admittedly, I’m a lumbering Lurch of a human being, but the closest approximation to dining inside its shotgun storefront I can think of is sitting in one of my kids’ classrooms for parent-teacher conferences.
Chef and owner Colleen Clawson has relocated Milque Toast a little farther south on Jefferson, between Pestalozzi and Arsenal streets. The new space is larger, relative to the original. It’s now simply a small restaurant.
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You also might already know Milque Toast’s new home. The restaurant has moved into the historic California Do-Nut Co. building. I don’t know how many times I’ve driven past this building over the years and wondered, “What if?†But its throwback charms seemed destined for the brick-by-brick ºüÀêÊÓƵ death by neglect, maybe hurried along now and then by an errant vehicle. An attempt last decade to reopen it as an actual doughnut shop never came to fruition.
Clawson and her team have made the building their own while retaining its sense of place. The exterior sign for Milque Toast isn’t unobtrusive, but it doesn’t clash with the familiar façade. The dining room — cozy, but not cramped, even with a bar counter along the back wall — highlights both pieces by local artists and such site-specific historical artifacts as a doughnut roller. The dessert menu includes a plate of miniature doughnuts.
You can also order those doughnuts for breakfast. Milque Toast is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is unusual enough by itself. Even more unusually, I can’t recommend one of those meals over the other two. I might as well start with breakfast, with a plate of Norwegian pancakes, lighter than your typical American batter discus, almost crêpe-like, dressed with tangy yogurt and, when I ordered them, a just-sweet-enough apple compote.
The pancakes’ particulars change often. Milque Toasts’ menu, breakfast through dinner, changes often. I spread my visits here over several weeks, and I can’t guarantee any dish I mention will be exactly the same or even available on the day this review is published, let alone a week from now. You still need to go.
Clawson is a talented, experienced chef inspired both globally and seasonally. She has cooked in such great restaurants as Sidney Street Cafe and the late Five Bistro, and her own projects include the Indian pop-up Baba Xavi. At Milque Toast in early May, she riffed on the classic Alsatian dish charcroute garnie, adding crisp apple slices to the traditional pairing of sauerkraut and warmly spiced sausage, with slices of toast on the side to sop up all the sweet, tangy, meaty drippings.
I understand why this dish is unlikely to return to the menu until the weather cools significantly. Honestly, though, I would order it again in the middle of a heat wave. More recently, sausage was a featured ingredient in Clawson’s Chili Cheese Polenta. This sausage displayed the crumbled texture and prickly heat of fresh Mexican-style chorizo, but the flavor evoked the smoke and gentle funk of cured Spanish-style chorizo. The texture and flavor alike contrasted with bright, crunchy celery and red bell pepper and more mellow sauteed onion on a bed of Parmesan-creamed polenta.
Whatever time of day you visit Milque Toast, you will find the sort of restaurant that has become a vanishing species: the casual, chef-driven neighborhood spot, its cooking even more brilliant and appealing for how unshowy it is. I would call Milque Toast the ideal neighborhood bistro, but as of now it doesn’t serve beer, wine or liquor.
The most memorable dishes across my visits were the most subtle. In place of another ho-hum Caesar salad, Clawson chars broccolini and dresses the snappy stalks, served hot, with lemon, Parmesan and gleaming anchovy. Though presented as a “small†dish on the menu, this might be the perfect light, vegetable-focused main course for summer.
Potato gnocchi are too often just ballast for a sauce or a second, more compelling ingredient, and they might have worked just as well here with meaty mushrooms, a silky white wine-butter sauce and a flirty wink of sweetness from Vidalia onion. But the gnocchi convey their own distinctive character, a bready flavor as light but definite as their chew. The key, Clawson told me, is her addition of sourdough starter to the mix.
Just a few weeks ago, in the midst of a disappointing series of visits to various new restaurants, I highlighted another relocated establishment, Locoz Tacoz in Maplewood. With the new version of Milque Toast, Clawson has given diners another delicious lesson in patient, deliberate growth and following your own path.
I really don’t know what dishes you will encounter when you visit Milque Toast. I’m so excited for you.