Last week we drove to Springfield, the state capital of Illinois. We had no pressing reason to go there but it has plenty to see, including one of the very best Frank Lloyd-Wright houses and Lincoln museums galore. I had thought we would take the train but when Lucy reminded me that we could drive there on Route 66 I was more than eager to hire a car instead.

I’ve had a thing about Route 66 ever since we drove along a stretch of it fifteen years ago. We were driving from the south rim of the Grand Canyon to the Hoover Dam and rather than take the obvious route we took a detour, past faded motels and parched diners. There was even a radio station you could only pick up on the Route, playing tracks like “Riding Along In My Automobile”. To the south we could see cars and trucks hurtling along the boring highway, but Route 66 was empty and interesting. Fun, even. I wanted to see more, all of it. I bought a guide to driving the entire “Mother Road” hoping one day to travel the entire route, from Chicago to Santa Monica in California.

I have a theory that the urge to undertake long journeys just for the sake of the journey itself is somehow instinctive in Man, a primal urge; that pilgrimages fulfil some innate need to go vast distances with no better reason than having endured the trip. Or perhaps it’s just me.

In the last few years I’ve seen various chunks of the road – a good stretch in California, some of it in Arizona and a few miles in Missouri – and every morsel has whetted my appetite for more. For a while it looked like we might drive the 4000 miles round trip to Phoenix this summer, which would mean doing the lion’s share of the road, but we decided against it. 4000 miles is a heck of a long way, especially when your destination is Phoenix.

I’ve never been able, despite many hours of googling and browsing, to work out a truly satisfactory way of getting my hands on a car to drive long distances in one direction only. Car hire firms usually charge a huge one-way fee. We paid that once, driving from Phoenix to Austin in Texas, which was galling, given that the car we were given in Arizona was registered in Texas and we were basically paying Enterprise to return their car to where it belonged. The fantasy is that you buy an old Chevy, drive it across the country and then sell it when you arrive on the other side, but this would be incredibly difficult and complicated. How would you register and insure it? Well, I suppose I could actually do that, as a “US Resident”, but it seems a palaver. No, I think what most Europeans do – and I sometimes wonder if driving Route 66 isn’t something that tourists do more than holiday-impoverished Americans – is swallow hard and pay the enormous one-way charge, ending up with a boring old Toyota Camry rather than their fantasy vintage car.

For our drive to Springfield we had a Chevrolet Knobhead, or something like that. It was quite good, except that I wouldn’t want to drive thousands of miles in it. Springfield is about 200 miles away, so the Knobhead was perfect.

The tricky thing about Route 66 is that they’ve built massive highways either over it or right next to it, and no-one can seem to decide absolutely where the original road went. Whenever you’re in a town of any size, there seem to be several roads which claim to be The Original Route 66. It’s easy to get lost, especially as many of the signs which are designed to help you find the road turn out to be misleading. In one town, while we were on a road marked with historic, brown Original Route 66 signs, we crossed another road at right angles which called itself Old Route 66. It was very confusing. We used the Knobhead’s on-board compass to find our way out of a few dead ends. The guide book was no help at all.

On the drive south, we decided to avoid the complexities of leaving Chicago on what’s left of Route 66, which may have been a slight loss in terms of sight-seeing, and went on the highway instead until we’d passed the quaintly-named but ugly town of Joliet, home of a massive state prison and neighbour to another town called Romeoville. Truly. As soon as we left the highway and were on the old road we saw a promising diner, outside of which stood a massive 1960s movie-style astronaut clutching a rocket, but the accompanying Gemini Family Restaurant was closed. It was the last interesting thing we saw for quite a while. Many businesses along the road can surely only rely on tourist traffic for trade and there’s really not that much from the mid 20th century left, in Illinois at least, to raise the pulse. We stopped a few times, trying and failing to find “must-sees” from my out-of-date guide book, pausing for some blueberry pie and coffee in a diner, and to check out the towns of Pontiac and Lincoln. Lincoln, named after Abe before he was president, was depressing – a once-thriving Victorian town centre built around a fine city hall, which had had the life sucked out of it by strip malls and Walmart. Even the splendid-looking soda fountain had died.

The highlight of the five hour drive south was the Funks Grove Maple Sirip (sic) Farm. The sirip (that’s really how they spell it) was delicious and we bought a bottle, but my Post Office credit card was frozen immediately afterwards. I guess the Post Office thought the name sounded dodgy, though they didn’t say so when I spent twenty minutes on the phone getting them to un-freeze it.

Returning from Springfield next day, we took the highsay. We’d had enough of getting lost.

One day I’d like to cross the States by car but I’m beginning to think that Route 66 isn’t the way to do it.

Poor old Saddo Abroad has been neglected while I’ve focussed on writing features for Sinfini that are related specifically to the art of being a singer. And when I say “art” I don’t mean that in an arty way, I mean it in an artful way. Like The Artful Dodger.

Anyway, unfettered by the constraints of writing for other people, I thought it was about time I dusted off my inner Saddo and wrote about things outside the realms of opera and the music business, which is why I started this blog in the first place. Somewhere along the line I got sidetracked and started venting my spleen about some popera singer or other. This got me lots of hits (my thing about Katherine Jenkins a while back still accounts for a lot of traffic) and I got lured into devoting too much attention to writing for a certain audience. Well, I now get paid to do that elsewhere, so I can keep Saddo Abroad for what it was meant to be: a place where I share my ramblings on travelling abroad as a middle-aged, occasionally grumpy git. Besides, a year later than I planned, I think I’ve finally finished my second book which uses a fair amount of stuff I’ve written here. I feel duty-bound to breathe some life back into my blog, given that I’ve just ripped out so many of its vital organs.

I’m in Chicago where we have a small apartment, north of the city centre and 7 minutes (not 6 or 8) from the lake. We (my wife Lucy and I) try to spend at least two months here every year, usually for a chunk near Christmas and another in the summer. Slowly but surely I am getting used to the extremes of weather and even more slowly I am learning to be an American (or “Muhrrcin” as it often sounds to my Anglo-Saxon ears).

I’ll never go the whole hog. I resist any Muhrrcinisation of my accent or the language I use. This sometimes means I could be speaking Bulgarian when, say at the hardware store, I get The Blank Look, when it is quite clear that my interlocutor (I once heard Bernstein use that word on a TV lecture and I’ve finally found my opportunity to use it, hurrah!) isn’t listening to what I’m saying; he’s just trying to figure out where the hell I’m from. Mind you, given I’ve just called what we might call in England an ironmonger’s a hardware store, I may not be managing my resistance as well as I fancy. And often I’ll ask a Muhrrcin if they’re standing in line rather than confuse them by using “queuing”, so don’t take my grandstanding too seriously.

Sometimes the English accent works to good effect. A woman in our local ice-cream café asked me to repeat my order just so she could listen to my accent. She went as gooey as a scoop of her frozen chocolate custard. And sometimes it doesn’t, as when, yesterday, I asked if I could pay for our lunch with a credit card and the waitress thought I wanted to pay with “a greyhound”.

There are two areas where I’m doing my best to assimilate myself and they seem to be absolutely fundamental to Muhrrcin male life. They are DIY and Barbecue.

I do a lot of DIY at home in England, so it’s not as if I’m a stranger to the beast; it’s just so very different over here. 

First there’s the language thing, again. Paints are a minefield. What we Brits call “oil gloss paint” is called Enamel. I don’t know what they call what we call Enamel. Emulsion is called Acrylic and varnish, Polyurethane. White spirit, Spec Thinners… Everything is a little bit different and seems to dry very quickly, no matter what it’s based on. Anything electrical is very different from home. I’m guessing it’s something to do with the puny voltage but everything seems to be much more flimsy and, frankly, dangerous.

Then there’s the plumbing. Radiators don’t fill with hot water; they fill with steam which comes via huge pipes from a vast furnace in the basement. As the steam doesn’t circulate, each radiator has to have a steam release valve, the size of a salt cellar, which hisses and pops when it’s doing its job. I’ve changed all those.

This afternoon I’m going to fit an air gap. This is a gizmo that sits next to the taps on the kitchen sink into which you plumb the waste pipe from the dishwasher. It stops dirty water going back into the dishwasher and is a legal requirement, though the woman who owned our place before us never had one, naughty naughty.

Despite all these differences, and in tools and equipment, going to our local hardware store is a joy. I avoid the warehouse stores, like Home Depot and Lowes, as they’re soulless and overwhelming. I go to Clark and Devon Hardware, which occupies a smallish old cinema and which is staffed by lovely old guys who know what they’re talking about. 

My usual opening line is “As you can probably tell, I’m not from around these parts” before I launch into a query about, say, how to replace a storm window. There’s banter, there’s idle chat and there’s always good advice.

If Muhrrcin man takes his DIY seriously, it’s nothing compared to the way he thinks about barbecuing. 

Now, when I was growing up my dad used to make what we called a barbecue out of an old biscuit tin punched with a few holes and a bit of chicken wire over the top. While this would garner some respect from a Muhrrcin for its ingenuity, it’s not what he would call a barbecue. He would call it a grill. No, a barbecue is a totally different beast. For starters a Muhrrcin barbecue is usually the size of a car and its function is not to cook quickly, but very, very slowly with hot smoke. This is something of a surprising paradox. Nearly all other Muhrrcin cooking is about speed and convenience whereas proper barbecuing is laborious and time-consuming.

If you have any experience of cooking Muhrrcin-style you’ll know that they like their thermometers. I saw some tortellini the other day that needed 8 minutes boiling “until they have reached an internal temperature of 185 degrees”. I’m sorry, but what kind of nutter is going to stick a thermometer into a tiny tortellino?

The Muhrrcin male barbecuer is obsessed with temperatures. They modify their smoking machines until they’re covered with the things and I’m finally beginning to see why. Ten or twenty degrees too low over several hours can make the difference between spareribs that are tough and chewy and ribs that are giving and succulent.

I did some St Louis cut ribs the other day. There’s a whole blog that could be written – and I’ve no doubt many have – on the difference between the various cuts of spareribs. Suffice it to say that St Louis ribs are medium length and fleshy. First I smeared them with mustard then added a dry rub that I’d cobbled together from paprika, cayenne, black pepper and a bit of sugar and salt. Too much salt and you end up with bacon.

My charcoal smoker is small and the shape of a vertical barrel, with a charcoal basket at the base, above that a water basin and above that two grills, topped with a domed lid. I popped the ribs onto the top grill and left them smoking for two hours without peeking, adding hickory chips to the coals from time to time through a little door in the side.

The smoker has one rather vague thermometer on the dome lid, where I aim to keep the dial at the e of Ideal but sometimes I wish I had some old-fashioned bellows to encourage the coals. Lucy’s hair dryer though is a reasonable substitute and she’s absolutely thrilled when I use it.

After two hours I sprinkled the ribs with apple juice then shut the lid again. Another hour and I took the ribs out, sploshed on more apple juice and wrapped them in foil before putting them back in the smoker. Another hour of that, then the ribs were out of the foil and now brushed with barbecue sauce (Trader Joe’s) for a final hour of smoking. Five hours in all.

They were good, but they could be better, and I think I need to do more to raise the temperature a few degrees. It looks like Lucy’s hair dryer will be busy. Or perhaps I can find some bellows somewhere and pay for them with my greyhound.

I’m writing this in our small Chicago apartment. The day outside is chilly and flat, passers-by wrapped up well against the cold lake air. The blistering, steam-filled radiators in the apartment hiss and wheeze. There’s coffee brewing on the stove. I’m wearing a polo-neck. Give me a pipe to smoke and a Remington typewriter and Central Casting really should be on the phone quicker than you can say “B movie”.
So, we now own a Chicago apartment.
Oo er.
It’s not in Downtown where all the skyscrapers live, but a few miles north in Edgewater. Not as far as Evanston. Still urban but with a feeling of neighbourhood. A mix of apartment buildings and archetypal American wooden houses. And Downtown is only a 30 minute ride away on the Red Line “El” (elevated railway) with a stop just three minutes’ walk from the apartment. So it’s a bit like living in Queen’s Park if you’re a Londoner.
And what a bargain we got. It sounds very swanky to drop that we’ve bought an apartment but when you realise it cost us less than what people are prepared to spend on a new kitchen, it seems like a very reasonable thing to do. Especially as it’s, well, so lovely – particularly if you, like us, are into the whole “vintage” thing. (“Oh darling, we simply adooooore vintage.”)
Regular readers will have twigged by now that if there’s a bargain to be hunted, a-hunting I will go. When in early December we got the word that we would close (that’s “complete” for Brits) on the day after Boxing Day, we went into overdrive to find all the stuff that turns an empty flat into a home. We had some stuff from Lucy’s parents in store in Arizona that was to be shipped up but we needed a lot of basics like chairs of all descriptions, and a table. So I started scouring Ebay and Craigslist to see what was on offer. Let me tell you straight away that Craigslist came up trumps every time.
So it was that I found myself ringing a guy called Ron in La Porte, Indiana, about 70 miles from our new place, to the east of downtown Chicago. He had a 50s diner set – a formica-topped table with two extra leaves and four chairs, the whole lot with chrome legs – for $140, abut £90. Bargain. Ron could not get over the fact that I was ringing from England. “England? Wow! I don’t think I ever had someone ring from England before. That’s amazin’!”
I get this a lot. Not so much the ringing from England thing, but my lack of an American accent. I speak to someone, in a hardware store for instance, and for the first fifteen seconds or so I can tell they’re not hearing me. They’re thinking “He’s not from round these parts! Is he Australian? Oh shit, what did he just ask me?” That and the fact that, in the area of DIY (or Home Improvement as they call it here), the amount of common terms for quite normal things are very few and far between. It’s the tomato-tomato thing. Almost.
They call emulsion paint latex paint. A skirting board is a base board. A blind is a shade, but not always. Curtains, drapes. Varnish is polyurethane. Ask for a radiator valve and you’ll get a funny-looking gizmo that sits on the side of the radiator and lets out steam. (The central heating in this place is still a novelty to me. A massive furnace sits in the basement and heats all ten apartments in the building. We have no control over when it comes on, but the apartment is warm all day, which feels like something of a wild extravagance to someone of Scottish blood who grew up in a house without central heating.) Visiting the hardware store, albeit one as fantastic as our local Clark-Devon Hardware, is simultaneously fascinating and petrifying. Yesterday I went in search of some simple lighting cable and a bog-standard lightbulb holder – the type you hang from the ceiling and which takes a lampshade. I was met with utter bemusement, as if I’d asked for a device for nailing a small pudding to my head. Pendant lamps are something of a novelty here – most people having “fixtures” or, as we have in three rooms, ceiling fans. I had to travel a couple of miles to get what I was looking for. One store, where I’d already bought a lampshade, wanted $20 for a length of wire and a lightbulb holder. Needless to say I gave them the heave-ho. Only days before I’d seen a new vacuum cleaner (albeit a small and probably useless one) for sale for $19. How on earth can a length of wire and plastic lamp-holder cost more than a hoover?!
Ron, in Indiana, despite my English accent and me ringing from England ‘n’ all, was happy to set aside the table and chairs until we could get to him just after Christmas. He was eager to tell me he is a man of his word. He told me so many times, which was slightly worrying. So while everyone back in Britain was eating turkey sandwiches, slumped for the umpteenth time in front of “Where Eagles Dare”, we were headed out of town in a massive Toyota Sienna to pick up our bargain dining set. The car, or “mini-van” (or moderately-sized bus, as it felt) was a Zipcar. Zipcar is an international car-share scheme that is extraordinarily brilliant if, like us, your need of a car is rare and intermittent. It’s all very high-tech (you can see how it works at zipcar.com) but thanks to an introductory coupon, the entire cost of renting the Toyota behemoth, including petrol etc, for the entire day was $8. So we not only had our road-trip to Indiana (not recommended for its scenery by the way – Gary for instance is a city that, with all due respect to people called Gary, is all you might expect it to be) where Ron lived with his son and dogs in a somewhat dreary corner of marshland, but we also took the opportunity to stock up with a lot of basics at Walmart (oh the shame!) as well as buy a couple of vintage chairs and a 50s step-stool, all of which fit in the in the back of the car with room to spare.

The hardware store has just rung, not to cast me as Pretentious-looking Would-be Writer in a movie, but to tell me that some storm windows I ordered (a process of unimaginable complication due mainly to the guy taking the order understanding about three out of every four words I said, compared to the one-in-three of his I got – so a win for England!) are ready. So excuse me while I wander off and stand outside the local pub to pick up their wifi, go online, book a Zipcar for half an hour, and then pick up the new windows.

The penny has dropped. I have spent years and years wondering why American tourists in London flock to Aberdeen Angus Steakhouses and now I think I have it figured out. Because, let’s face it, you’d have to be something of an idiot to take a close look at one and not realise that they’re awful. If, like me, you grew up in the age of the Berni Inn you’ll associate the word Steakhouse with something naff and third-rate, barely a short step up from a Little Chef. In the States a steakhouse is an altogether different beast.

In Chicago we were hunting around for places to eat. Our first night in town we went to a Michelin-starred place called Boka which I didn’t like much. The cuisine was what you could call Italian-Pacific fusion. That stuff always makes me wary but I was up for an experiment. The first course was great – stuffed baby squid on a bed of spinach. The second was just weird. Ravioli, filled with beef (“steak tips”), were dotted around a large oblong plate which was also covered in tiny gobs of various vegetable purées as well as little bits of morel, the odd pea and dribbles of “truffle jus”. It looked a mess and it tasted a mess. The ravioli were greasy and would have been fine in a good old-fashioned tomato sauce but not like this. Perhaps I wasn’t in the best of moods, having just lost my reading glasses for the second time on the trip, but I also found the service cloying. Each item was described fully on the menu (which in itself is overkill – I don’t need to to know every single bloody ingredient in the dish) so it struck me as fairly ridiculous when the expeditor (the odd name they give to the bloke who delivers your food to the table as opposed to the waiter who takes your order) laid down our plates and obsequiously described the dish in minute detail all over again. You do reach a point where you want to tell him to just fuck off. Lucy had a fish dish with piles of mushy red rice. The point of the redness of the rice utterly eludes me. It was a bit of a disaster and she couldn’t finish it.

(The evening was saved by seeing an excellent play, Middletown, brilliantly performed across the road at Steppenwolf.)

The next night I was in the mood for something much more old-school with white linen tablecloths (Boka’s were black – oh puh-lease…) and less pretentious waiters, and the more I hunted on Yelp the more it because clear that, downtown at least, our best bet would be a steakhouse. Yelp was telling me that steakhouses were places where you went on special occasions, dads’ birthdays being a favourite, and especially when you wanted to push the boat out. Not exactly my experience of steakhouses in England but I was intrigued and as it turned out, Yelp wasn’t wrong. (It was wrong about Boka though.)

We decided on Benny’s Chop House principally because a review had described it as like stepping onto the set of Mad Men, and that alone sounded like our idea of a good night out.

Well, let it be said that on the evidence of Benny’s a Chicago steakhouse is about as similar to an Aberdeen Angus as a Rolls Royce is to a tricycle. The service is impeccable for starters. Lucy had an organic, grass-fed Kansas strip and I had a 12 oz dry-aged rib. We shared two sides: a charred romaine salad and a basket of fries. The salad was the star of the meal. A romaine is split lengthways, singed on a griddle, drizzled with a citrus dressing and topped with Parmesan shavings. The fries came in a little deep-frying basket (and cost a whopping $5.99). Rather than ask us how we wanted our steaks cooked we were asked what temperature we would like them. A new one on me. I can only guess that in a country where meat thermometers are commonplace some people actually answer that question with some digits. We said “medium rare”. The food was very good but let’s face it, not exactly the stuff that demands the highest-trained chefs in the world. That’s not to diss the skill of the people grilling the steaks – there’s nothing worse than duffly-cooked meat – but “haute cuisine” it isn’t.

The food was expensive, no doubt about it (and I guess those poor buggers in Aberdeen Angus see the menu and think they may be onto a bargain), but the drink pricing was a whole other ballgame.

When I eat out in Europe I’d say the norm is to be handed the wine list with the menu and once everyone has decided what they’re eating there follows a discussion about what to drink and someone chooses a bottle. Not so in the States. We sat down and after a moment our very slick waiter presented us with a cocktail list and the wine list. Well, being in Mad Men mode we had to order a couple of martinis and no sooner had we done so than the waiter whisked away the wine list, well before we’d even seen the menu. So we had to ask for it back. Speaking personally, after a large martini there’s no way I can tackle half a bottle of wine so now we were into the realm of ordering single glasses of wine. In fact, ordering single glasses is what they expect (and want) you to do. I don’t know how they do it but waiters manage to turn drinks ordering into a strictly one-by-one affair. Perhaps it’s rooted in a culture of expense accounts where everyone at a table wants separate checks. I don’t know, but you realise at the end of the meal that you’ve spent a vast amount on a very small amount of wine. I’m told that the typical policy is to charge for a glass what the restaurant actually pays for a bottle. Add onto that price sales tax and a  20% tip and it gets positively bonkers. Lucy had a glass of an Oregon Pinot that cost $21. That’s about $28 (£17) by the time you’ve actually paid for it. For a 6oz glass. My Zinfandel was $17. And these were on the cheaper end of the list. You can see why the Don Drapers of this world stick to Martinis at $12 a pop. Benny’s Chop House sells a Richard Hennessy cognac for an astounding $375 a glass. How that single brandy would then merit a $70 tip beats me, but so it goes.

When you’re spending that sort of money on a bevvy then you must surely be in a macho world that I find quite disgusting; one where businessmen try and out-impress each other with the size of their willies, I mean expense allowances.

Don’t get me wrong. We had a good evening. I just think I’d rather blow $100 a head on, say, a tasting menu of small dishes at a French restaurant with a shared bottle of wine, than a meal that, let’s face it, consisted solely of a big steak, chips and salad, washed down with a couple of drinks. That is, after all, all that we ate. No starters or puddings.

So that’s your Chicago steakhouse for you.

A bit stunned, we walked around the streets of Chicago and into the lobbies of some of its astonishing buildings. Then we bought a tub of Ben & Jerry’s “Americone Dream” from a Seven-Eleven and ate it with plastic spoons lying on our hotel bed, watching The Late Show.

—-

I’ll be posting this from back home in England having only had time to write on the overnight flight. I had hoped to sleep but that didn’t work out.

I’m sure we’re all used to looking around a departure area and thinking “oh please, please, don’t let me be sat next to him.” No? I do it all the time. The guy I picked out was a 70 year old Indian man who must have been sitting a good ten feet away. The thing that was bugging me was that every two minutes he would clear his throat noisily, as if dealing with a serious case of post-nasal drip.

Well sure enough he’s in the very next seat to me and he has cleared his throat for the entirety of the eight hour flight. Not only that, but he has quite stupefying BO, so bad that I worry it is seeping into my clothes as well as his.

So if this is full of typos I apologise but I haven’t slept a wink. 

I’m trying my best not to be disappointed. That’s especially difficult when you haven’t had much sleep. It was Lucy’s last show last night and afterwards we went to The Tent (the marquee with a bar where cast and audience mingle after performances) so we could make our farewells. There had been the odd rumbles of distant thunder earlier in the evening but the skies were pretty clear. Within half an hour we were in the grip of a full midwestern storm.
Now, the weather in Saint Louis is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. For starters I’d never heard a tornado warning until this trip. Sirens blare and a barely intelligible voice echoes around the city telling everyone to get into their cellars. With recent news of Joplin, where hundreds died when a massive tornado touched down, a twister so fierce that it stripped the bark off trees, and seeing for myself Saint Louis airport, which had been hit at Easter and where half the windows are still boarded up with chipboard, you bet I was down in that cellar the moment that siren started wailing. Luckily no tornado landed on our neighbourhood but a few other parts of town got visited upon for a moment or two and the odd roof got stripped.
Thunderstorms have a habit of whipping up in an instant, or so it would appear if you’re not a meteorologist. I think what they really do is zoom across the empty plains like vicious joyriders, smacking things around a bit for a few moments of noisy chaos and then leaving as quickly as they arrived. Last night’s was no exception apart from the matter of its departure. It arrived quickly but it clearly liked beating up Saint Louis and so, oddly, it hung around for four hours. Only during a brief lull in the torrential rain were we able to escape The Tent and run to our car to drive home. At 3 a.m. the storm finally eased up and staggered off to bed, like a belligerent drunk.
We were up again at 6.15 and off to the railway station by 7. We’re taking the Amtrak train, The Texas Eagle that began its journey more than a day ago in San Antonio, up to Chicago. I’m on it now as I blogify.
America has some fine railway stations. Washington DC’s Union Station is lovely. New York’s Grand Central is stunning. A pity that most useful trains go from the much duller Penn (though I would loved to have seen the old Penn Station, notoriously flattened before its destruction could be prevented). Los Angeles’ Union Station is another beauty. Saint Louis used to be one of the busiest rail hubs in the country and its old Union Station reflected that – a manorial terminus built in stone. As I’ve blogged recently, the Amtrak station has been moved and Union Station is now a chain hotel and third-rate shopping centre. The new station is a steel-framed shed that makes Bristol Parkway and Watford Junction seem luxurious. Such a pity and a real downer when you’ve envisaged something from a 1930s movie, with a steaming station buffet-cum-oyster-bar (as you find in Grand Central), that’s peopled with ticket clerks wearing green visors and sleeve bracelets, with porters wearing smart blue uniforms and beaming smiles.
Amtrak would have you believe many of these things and a few others besides. They offer a free checked baggage service. We thought this would be a good idea rather than handling our four suitcases ourselves. So we rolled up good and early only to be told that the service wasn’t available. We waited for a half hour, not unlike waiting to board a Ryanair flight, and schlepped our luggage onto the train. The carriages on this route are double-decker and you leave your bags below and ride up top. Oddly, like Ryanair, you have a train reservation but no reserved seat. A conductor asks you where you’re headed and points you into a carriage where you look for a seat that doesn’t already have a ticket above it, or a person in it, and climb in. Shortly the conductor comes along (there are plenty of them on American trains), checks your ticket and scribbles out a reservation slip for the seats. That’s you set for the rest of your journey. Now you can wander around the train or sit in the observation car (or Lounge Car as they call it).
Amtrak’s blurb says this train has a dining car. You can even look at the menu online. There are photos with smiling chefs and white linen table cloths. I was up for a bit of this and last night had already punted on French toast with maple syrup served, so I imagined, from an elegant metal jug with Amtrak’s logo on the side. And coffee in a cup, china of course. On the white linen cloth.
We asked the conductor if the dining car was open for breakfast. “The dining car is not in operation but you can buy snacks from below the lounge”. Oh. No apology or explanation. No smile. That’s just the way it is, and I suspect it’s the way it always is on this leg of the journey. That explained why we saw several passenger detraining at Saint Louis (where the train stops for about an hour) and popping into the station’s KFC for some hot, albeit disgusting food. Yes, that’s what you get instead of the steaming buffet-cum-oyster-bar, a KFC and a Pizza Hut. So much for progress.
As the train crawled out of Saint Louis and across the seething Mississippi I volunteered to get us some breakfast. Lucy bagged a booth in the Lounge Car and I went downstairs. The buffet made First Great Western’s seem positively opulent. A guy who had clearly been to a special Amtrak clinic to have any bonhomie surgically drained from his system responded to my request for various breakfast items from the menu in a flat negative which kind of implied I was several kinds of idiot to even ask for them.
“Two of your yoghurts please.”
“There ain’t any.” (Thinks: what kind of moron wants yoghurt?)
I gave up scanning the menu (Bagel and Cream Cheese? Nope…Muffin? Nope…) and just ordered what I could see scattered about him. So we each had a plastic-wrapped Sara Lee cinnamon danish and coffee in paper cups. It turns out he was doing an egg, sausage and cheese muffin because someone else got one, scalding hot and still wrapped in cellophane, which can only mean it had been electrocuted in a microwave. I think I’d rather stick with the eternally “fresh” danish. Funny that, as it was trying very hard to stick to me.
Next to the Lounge we could see a Dining Car. My hackles preparing to rise, I asked a passing steward about it. “Only open to sleeper passengers” was the response. Sleeper passengers get meals included in the price of the ticket so feeding the few people I could see in there was an obligation. I couldn’t see any table cloths though. Or jugs of maple syrup.
The Lounge Car is all very well with its curved ceiling windows and outside-facing seats but on this stretch of journey there is very little to look at. The countryside of Illinois is an expanse of dull farmland, mostly vast fields of corn. Otherwise it’s all suburbs or, worst of all, large tracts of ruined industrial landscape. You could be forgiven for thinking, from looking out of the windows as you pass through most of these cities, that America is pretty-much broken. It’s an impression that riding in its slow and inefficient trains does very little to dispel. What a pity.

Huh. No sooner had I plonked down that last full stop when something rather sweet happened. A conductor announced that there was pizza for the whole train, a slice each which we could collect from the Lounge Car. She called us in, coach by coach (there are only three coaches aside from the sleepers and the Lounge and Dining cars) and everyone took back to their seats a slice of cheese, pepperoni or sausage pizza, on an Amtrak (plastic) plate as well as some cookies, crackers and dried fruit. It looked like the pizzas has been delivered straight to the train at the station where we last stopped.
How very surprising and I’ve no idea why they did it. I also see that we are now running along side the old Route 66. Things are looking up. For $32 (£20) each for a ticket it seems churlish of me to moan.

Before I got here I assumed that the Opera Theatre Saint Louis (let’s just call it OTSL from now on) was a repertory opera company that performed throughout the year, but it’s actually a summer-only set-up. Its closest equivalent in Britain would be Glyndebourne, although that gives entirely the wrong impression. For starters no-one here wears evening dress to the performances, nor is OTSL a company that aims to appeal to an exclusive audience as part of “the season”. It performs in an unusual theatre that seats about 900, which is intimate by American standards, and the audience is arranged in an amphitheatre around a thrust-stage. There is a proscenium too but because the audience is arranged in a 180 degree arc anything played behind it is lost to a large chunk of the house. So they don’t tend to do that.

The theatre is on a university campus, not in the grounds of a country manor, which is handy; as term is over the army of young artists that come for the season can live on site in student digs. The young artists cover principal roles and make up a chorus where necessary; a bit like the Glyndebourne Chorus, but the emphasis is on their solo abilities as opposed to their use as choristers. From what I’ve been able to hear they are a talented bunch. Some of them do principal roles.

The big surprise for me was that all four operas they perform each season are sung in English. This season they kicked off with Don Giovanni and each subsequent week sees the opening of the next opera, until the last two weeks when all four shows are up and running in rep. This week, the last of the season, they will give eight performances, two of them matinées.

Something else unusual: they pay the singers a weekly salary rather than a performance fee. Because of the staggered start dates the singers arrive in waves, one cast a week after the previous. The earlier in the season your show opens, the more performances you will have (and the more time off between shows), but because you are in Saint Louis for longer you will also take home more pay. It’s a pretty equitable system I must say. It also means that if you fall ill for a show you still get paid, though it has to be said that if you’re sick you still have to walk the part while your understudy sings from the side. Understudies are never sent on to act. I assume the thinking is that they are so busy with all their other commitments that there’s no way they can be rehearsed sufficiently to bung them on stage.

The Saint Louis Symphony, which is a very fine orchestra, plays in the pit. Their concert season is over for the summer so it’s an ideal arrangement. The Symphony basically splits into two with each half playing two operas apiece.

Another difference with the usual country house opera set-up we experience in Britain is that there is a large and loyal local following for OTSL. Some punters attend every single show in the season, something that boggles my little mind. After each performance, audience and performers are encouraged to mingle in The Tent, a large open-sided marquee on a lawn by the theatre, and booze the night away. There’s no long interval but punters are encouraged to picnic before and after the show. OTSL even gives the singers vouchers to use at the bar after the show, something I don’t recall Glyndebourne ever having done.

It’s all very collegiate, social and un-starry and I wonder how much of that is to do with the influence of Colin Graham, who used to be here for many years. I only worked with him once, in the early 90s at Covent Garden, and a more considerate and diligent director you would struggle to meet. I was just singing the Glass-seller in “Death in Venice” but was amazed to get a thank-you note from him after the run, as did everyone in the cast.

There are a couple of things at OTSL that I would find alarming if I were working here rather than simply observing from close quarters (for that read: bumming around while the missus brings home the bacon). Colin introduced the concept of The Wingers. These are patrons who, in exchange for extra financial donations, can sit in on practically every single rehearsal. They sit to one side (the wings) and aren’t allowed to make a sound, but I know I would find their presence disconcerting. How could you have a good old swear if you screw up? And isn’t screwing up a good part of the rehearsal process? If you don’t dare to make mistakes it all gets a bit careful and dull doesn’t it? What if a winger pays a compliment to one singer and not another? Wouldn’t that be the seed for a good dose of paranoia?

The other odd thing is that each show has only two stage-and-orchestra rehearsals and both of them count as public dress rehearsals. So the very first time you step on stage with your full kit and make-up on with a band in the pit, there will be a few hundred bods watching you.

I can see this is all part of a plan to engender a sense of connection between stage and auditorium, which I’m sure helps with patronage and support, but they are sailing dangerously close to the line of demarcation between performer and punter, a line that I rather like. While I applaud the idea, there are times – many of them in fact – when you want that line to be a twelve foot wall, for reasons no other than your sanity and sense of self-preservation. It also shields you from all those questions like “How long did it take you to learn your role?” which are of genuine interest to the civilian but which are totally baffling to the foot-soldier.

But this is America where you have to do everything in your power to bring in revenue, and in OTSL it clearly works. I believe I’m right in saying that despite some adventurous programming over the years they have never gone over budget. Compare that to the train wreck that is happening at New York City Opera and it’s a pretty remarkable thing.

I went to San Francisco with very few preconceptions. I’ve seen the Steve McQueen movie “Bullitt” a couple of times and various other films set in the city. So I knew it was hilly, that it had cable cars, the Golden Gate bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf, but that was about it.

I took the BART train from the airport, as it seemed the sensible thing to do, and it wasn’t at all bad. It’s a subway train really, though who thought it a good idea to put carpet in a subway train is clearly someone who doesn’t travel by public transport very much. I was downtown in about half an hour.

I’d booked a small hotel in Nob Hill on the basis that it looked close enough to the opera to walk – there’s nothing worse than getting to grips with a strange transport system on the morning of an important audition – and it wasn’t expensive, nor was it seedy. The Nob Hill Inn fit the bill perfectly; a twenty-five minute stroll to the War Memorial opera house and quiet and comfy. No bells and whistles, no gym or trouser press. $89 per night including a light breakfast and free wifi (though why ANY hotel charges for wifi these days is a mystery). My room was a little gloomy I suppose as it faced an inner courtyard, but I wasn’t there to spend any daytime in my room and I didn’t mind in the slightest.

There are three things in a singer’s life which are pretty-well equally terrifying and they are The First Night, The First Day Of Rehearsals and The Audition. I try and treat the whole audition process with a sort of take-it-or-leave-it disdain. “This is what I do and if you don’t like it then clearly we’re not meant for each other” is the attitude I try and have in mind. Not that I do very many auditions these days; certainly not as many as I had to do when I was a nipper. Longevity in the job is no bar to having to go through the process though. Certainly not in an age where companies like ENO make every Tom, Dick and Harry sing for directors who have absolutely no experience in the medium and yet, for some reason beyond my understanding, feel the need to be consulted. I once had to fly in to London from Amsterdam at a godawful hour, the morning after a show, travel halfway across town and sing to a neophyte director who confessed to having no idea what we were supposed to do. I said “how about I sing a bit of Britten?” She stood there while I let her have it and all she could say afterwards was that I was fine, but she thought that when we got around to doing the opera I should be sure not roll any Rs. In fact, a couple of years later when we eventually rehearsed the thing, that was about the only piece of direction I got during the course of eight weeks. Not a happy time.

Anyway, I did my thing for the bods at San Francisco Opera on the stage of their very large theatre, standing by the prompt box on the set of The Ring. Unexpectedly, the pianist completely stopped playing at one point and I fluffed the next line, but I hope no-one minded. And then I went and had lunch.

I went to a kitschy diner called Lori’s and ordered a Club Sandwich with fries. It was only then, hearing a bunch of Yorkshire accents from the booth behind me, that it dawned on me that I was deep in the heart of touristsville. Now, I know I was done with work and was also technically a tourist, but I hadn’t come to San Francisco with the aim of being a tourist and so I felt entitled to feel superior and up myself in the way every singer I know does when they’re working in a city as opposed to visiting it for, you know, pleasure. Of course, having spent the last four weeks in Saint Louis where I’ve seen and heard no European tourists at all, to suddenly find myself surrounded by Dutch, Germans and Brits, all of them in their standard issue, horrid tourist clothes, with their backpacks, guidebooks and cameras, was something of a shock. I felt snobby and horrified. As you can probably tell.

It didn’t stop me doing the touristy things though, albeit with a very superior attitude. The man at the desk of the hotel had advised me, if I planned on getting around on cable cars, to buy a three day “passport” for $20. A single ride costs $5 and as the Inn was near the top of a considerable hill and near the junction of the two cable car lines, I imagined myself popping all over town on the quaint old cars, hopping on and off at will. So I bought a pass.

As it turned out, this was a mistake. One line, that goes West-East along California, isn’t working and there’s a replacement bus instead, for which the single fare is only $2. This, I’m sure, has put a lot more pressure than usual on the other line, the Powell Street line, that runs North-South, not because of the direction it’s travelling but because all those bloody tourists want to have a go on the cable car. I first tried to catch a cable car a few blocks up from its southern terminus but it was packed and no-one was being let on. Every car that passed was full. It soon became clear that the only way to get on was at the very extremes of the line. I eventually managed to get on one later at it’s northernmost stop, near Fisherman’s Wharf but I had to queue for about half an hour and wait until the third car pulled up. It struck me that this really wasn’t a means of transport at all but a theme park ride. I really couldn’t be bothered to use it again as it was a pretty useless way of getting around town.

I did use the F line a few times. That runs from the heart of the city out to the Ferry Building and then past all the piers to Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s unusual because it uses a variety of beautiful vintage trams from all over the States, painted in different liveries, and even an old wooden tram from Milan. Though when I first took that route I thought my travel karma was particularly bad; I waited for a good twenty minutes while loads of trams passed in the other direction and when something did eventually turn up it was, of course, a replacement bus.

The Ferry Building is full of foodie fun as it has become a posh gourmet market. It was almost the highlight of my visit.

Pier 39 at Fisherman’s Wharf is a tourist magnet and the best way I found to deal with it was to skirt along the very outside of the pier, thus avoiding the plethora of cutesy restaurants and retail outlets that draw the throngs. I saw Alcatraz across the bay. I could just about see The Golden Gate through the sea mist and dazzling sun. And I saw the harbour seals. Then I left again, annoyed by the swarms of touroids who were spoiling my tourism.

In the evening I ate at a very basic Italian café a few blocks from the hotel. I was too tired to be adventurous or to enjoy eating a fine meal alone. Besides, I had no idea where to go where I could avoid couples from Croydon in Hawaiian shirts. Yelp!, the handy online guide, was suggesting restaurants but they all seemed to involve a trek across a town. I reckoned I’d already spent a good hour or more queuing for transport. I’d lost the will to do it any more that night. I could have walked to Chinatown but I never think that a Chinese meal for one is a great success. Besides I’d eaten some noodles the night before, straight after checking in at the hotel. A nice quiet wine bar would have done me perfectly but I just couldn’t find one.

The next day I had a few more hours to kill before heading to the airport, so I ambled around the shopping streets near Union Square. I thought the Apple shop, so close to Silicon Valley, might be the mothership of all Apple shops but it was just like all the others. A bit at a loss as to what to do in a limited time, I took an old Boston tram back to Fisherman’s Wharf with a view to getting a better look at the Golden Gate but there was still a lot of mist engulfing it. So I walked a bit further on and ended up looking at the fishing boats and the plethora of fishy restaurants nearby. Curiously, no-one was bothering to walk along the pier where the boats were moored – too busy gaping at the freshly-steamed crabs I suppose – and I had it to myself.

With time running out and concerns about how long it would take me to get back to the inn to collect my bag (given my persistent bad luck with transport), I thought “what the hell” and dove into one of the fishy eateries for lunch. And it wasn’t at all bad. I had a cup of clam chowder then some crab cakes, with some sourdough bread on the side. Service was brisk (I had barely finished my chowder before the crab arrived) but polite and I was out again in forty minutes. Just as well because the trams were running slow again and it took me a full hour to get back to my hotel.

San Francisco is rather alarming compared to sedate Saint Louis. Perhaps tourism attracts them but there were awful lot of panhandlers and, I hesitate to say it, strange people around Downtown. I saw one poor woman who was walking along, arguing loudly with herself. She stopped suddenly, dropped the carrier bags she was carrying and slapped herself sharply across the face before picking up her bags and continuing her noisy promenade. Apart from the yelling, she appeared to be perfectly normal. Perhaps she’d just done a few too many ENO auditions and it had finally got to her.

When I was lunching in Lori’s Diner a man dressed in classic gay leathers shimmied in for a look at a glass case that contains a dress once worn by Elizabeth Taylor. He had huge circles of bright red blusher on his cheeks and put on a performance of such over-the-top adoration of the Taylor reliquary that for a moment I thought he must be taking the piss. But he wasn’t. Just a bit eccentric. Or perhaps not.

California is known as the land of fruit and nuts. Los Angelinos, or whatever you care to call them, are all about show business, so I get them. I know why they’re there and what drives them. They’re still mostly bonkers though. San Franciscans I have yet to figure out. It could take some time and who knows if I’ll ever be back. That could all depend on how the audition went, and frankly I haven’t a clue.

If you find yourself in Saint Louis and in need of breakfast, I have just the place for you: Uncle Bill’s Pancake House. There are two branches, open 24 hours a day, and we’ve now been go the one on Kingshighway twice. It’s not much to look at. The neon sign is broken and it is half-timbered on the inside as well as the outside. But once you’ve slid into a booth and one of the long-serving waitresses has given you an iced water and your first cup of coffee you realise you’re in American breakfast Nirvana.
The first time we went I had the 2+2+2+2 Special for $7.95. That’s two eggs, two link sausages, two strips of bacon, two buttermilk pancakes and an order of hash browns. I don’t know their secret but the pancakes are very, very good with just the right balance of cake-iness and syrup absorbency.
A couple of days later and we were back. This time I had biscuits and gravy with some scrambled eggs on the side. If you’ve never had biscuits and gravy you must give them a go. The biscuits are best described to Brits as very light scones, a bit like a very soft soda bread. You get two, split in half, with the gravy poured over. But this is not gravy as we Brits know it. For starters, it’s white. I’ve made breakfast gravy and this is what you do: crumble some breakfast sausage (the innards of a good banger or two will do) into a hot pan, keep breaking it up with a spoon, and cook it until it is well done and has rendered its fat. Lift out the little lumps of meat with a slotted spoon and sprinkle a tablespoon of flour onto the remaining fat, cook it for a mo, then stir in full-cream milk, or “half-and-half”, or milk and cream – it’s up to you – until you have a good white sauce. Bung back in the sausage bits, stir, season, and there it is. Pour over the warm biscuits until they are well and truly smothered.
Uncle Bill’s were good, though I do think my home-made were better, though I’ll confess to not having made the biscuits from scratch. Just about everyone in the States buys those tubes of ready-made dough which you break open to reveal several ready-to-bake biscuits, so I did too.
I ate half of Lucy’s pancakes. She wasn’t going to make it through her whole stack, not with her corned beef hash and poached eggs.

At the other extreme we dined with our hosts in an extremely smart restaurant called Tony’s, in the heart of Downtown. Our hosts’ daughter worked there many years ago as a pasta chef. She died of AIDS seventeen years ago, but how she became infected is still a mystery. All of her sexual partners were contacted and tested negative and she never had a blood transfusion. The best guess is that she became infected when a burn was being treated. It’s a tragic story, made all the more poignant by the fact that yesterday, when we dined at the restaurant, was her birthday. Dinner was a thank you from the four of us staying in the house to our extraordinary and unbelievably generous hosts.
The cuisine is high-end American Italian and the service is very high-end with a large army of waiters to keep an eye on you. The walls are covered with good modern art, except in the bar which has a vast rogue’s gallery of signed photos of celebs (including three ex-Presidents) who have dined there. Dishes are finished and plated at the table with plenty of pizzazz. I had a Tony’s salad to start – mostly green leaves with strips of salami – and then one of their signature dishes, Lobster Albanello; big chunks of lobster tail cooked with mushrooms, cream and brandy. It was delicious but was nearly eclipsed by the expertly-cooked side dish of spinach. A pity that my trousers were, inexplicably, a bit too tight.
It was a lovely evening but unless you’re on an expense account (which, clearly, several people were) it’s not a place where people on a normal income can afford to eat regularly. As an indicator, their tasting menu, with wine, is $210 per person. Wine-less it’s $180. Bung on top of that tax and a 20% tip (which is what they would expect), as well as paying the parking valet, and the eyes start to water. I’m pretty sure the tasting menu doesn’t include caviar. I say this because I noticed that one ounce of the stuff a la carte is $110.
I’m not sure if you get a stack of buttermilk pancakes with that but somehow I doubt it.

Life for me in St Louis isn’t all blogging, swimming pools and smokehouses. No siree, no. I am actually squeezing in a bit of singing too. And, oddly, I’ve actually quite enjoyed it.
Now, if you’re not a professional singer, if indeed in singers’ parlance you’re a “civilian”, you possibly won’t get that remark. You would naturally assume that we singers enjoy singing all the time. Well, no, that would be an amateur who does that, in the literal sense of the word. I’m not saying that professionals never enjoy singing. I’m just saying that professionals don’t have the luxury of singing exclusively when we feel like it. We have to do it an awful lot of times when it’s about the last thing we feel like doing. And I’m not saying that professional singers don’t love singing (and I use the word “love” advisedly); it’s just that, like all affairs of the heart, it can be something of a stormy and complex relationship. In fact I’m finding these days that it’s a bit like dealing with a parent that’s going through the onset of dementia.
As the parent/voice gets older the instances of lucidity and clarity become shorter-lived. The real person/voice is in there somewhere but he is befuddled and it takes a lot of patience and gentle coaxing to get him out. This can lead to frustration and tears, culminating in putting the parent/voice in a home that smells of pee and forgetting all about him. Well, perhaps not so much on the last thing, but you get my drift.
In spite of these difficulties that the ageing singer faces – and these are inevitable and undeniable truths; I’m not being twisted and cynical – I can still find myself being pleasantly surprised by the physical act of singing.
Take yesterday. I drive Lucy into her piano dress rehearsal, go to my usual haunt for a cappuccino and a catch-up on Twitter and Facebook (which takes a long time in the mornings when you’re six hours behind most of your friends) and then drive back to our digs.
Despite every fibre of my being opposing the idea, I think I should do some practice. I have an audition next week (and I’ll get to auditions in another post). I start warming up, very gently at first to coax the old bugger into life and then with a bit more gas. It seems to take an age to feel like a tenor again. Finally I have my full range. I sing through all my numbers, fiddling about, trying new things. Playing a bit. I have no real idea if any of it is any good but after a while the rush starts. It must be something to do with taking in larger quantities of oxygen or the release of endorphins, but bugger me if I don’t start to feel the old sensations of elation. They are nothing to do with any sense of self-satisfaction but are entirely physical. I carry on for a good hour. Normally I hate practising if I think anyone can hear me, but once the rush has kicked in I’m past caring. And after I’ve finished, when my voice is getting tired, the chemicals keep pumping through the veins and I’m on an up for an hour or two more.
Am I back at the piano the next morning? Like hell I am.
Like a middle-aged subscriber to an expensive gym, all the elation is forgotten and all I can see is the struggle up the vocal hill, while my nostrils seem to be filled with the faint smell of pee from the Silver Meadows Home For The Elderly Vocal Cords.

I’ve also watched a dress rehearsal of The Death of Klinghoffer, and I was bowled over. The Opera Theatre, like Glyndebourne and Garsington, has a young chorus during its short festival season, made up of young artists on the foothills of the profession. John Adams’ choruses are fiendishly hard and to see these young singers go for it with conviction, passion and finesse was a very moving experience. All the moaning and sniping, the accusations about opera and the resultant outrage – all of that seemed insignificant in the face of such commitment to the art.
So, if some people aren’t comfortable with the world of opera, there are very many of all races and classes who are, and who are hungry for the chance to prove it. Watching the rehearsal I was overwhelmed, bathed in a sudden sense of reassurance. I found myself thinking that if anyone in my profession doesn’t realise that we are all eventually replaceable then they must be an idiot. Oddly, rather than making me sad, this makes me feel extremely happy.

I haven’t posted in several days, partly because my brother was in town for the Memorial Day weekend and partly because I’ve been out being a tourist. One day I tried doing this on public transport, as I’m a firm believer in the stuff, but while the MetroLink train – a fairly new light train system – was very good and shot me from west to east in no time, the buses were a bit crap. I had very long waits – I gave up once and walked the two miles I wanted to go – and the sad fact is that in this town (unlike New York for instance) bus travel seems to be exclusively for the impoverished or the slightly deranged. In my khaki shorts and pink polo shirt I looked and felt desperately out of place. Fellow travellers looked at me oddly, thinking perhaps that I must have been caught Driving Under the Influence and banned from driving; though one man tried to engage me in a conversation about some recent shootings-cum-killings and I really didn’t want to get into that on a crowded bus.
Sad to say that most of the impoverished are black. Indeed the only army recruiting office I have seen so far has been in a neighbourhood best described as poor and predominately African-American. Ugh.
This is not The South though. Indeed, without getting into a history lesson, Saint Louis has played a massive and pivotal role in the advancement of Civil Rights.
What have I seen? A quick rundown:
The Arch, Saint Louis’ most famous landmark. Built in the 1960’s it’s America’s tallest monument at over 600 feet and very impressive it is too, bang next to the slightly flooded Mississippi. There’s a lift-tram thing that takes you up the inside but we ran out of time to do that. Just as well as I suffer from vertigo and I think I would have been in several kinds of torture at the top. We did watch a fascinating old documentary on the building of the Arch and the aerial views of steeplejack floating around on girders hundreds of feet above the ground were enough to give me the heeby-geebies. Try and work out how to erect an enormous arch built out of stainless steel and your mind quickly boggles. The way they did it was extraordinary and too long to detail here. No wonder it took well over two years to build.

The Art Museum is really excellent and FREE! As is, wait for it… the zoo! I haven’t been to the zoo, but when was the last time you saw a free zoo? Free entry is guaranteed by statute, which is a very civilised thing. Both are sited in Forest Park which is simply enormous; bigger than New York’s Central Park, and the site of the World’s Fair of 1904. The Art Museum’s collection is not especially spectacular but there are some lovely things in it, especially the German Expressionists.

Also in the park is the Missouri History Museum, also free, and worth visiting especially for its exhibitions on the World’s Fair and on Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic in 1927 in the Spirit of St Louis. I had no idea that he became an environmental campaigner in the 1960s. The size of the World’s Fair was and is truly extraordinary. The Art Museum and a smallish pavilion are the only two buildings remaining from the Fair. All the rest were built out of timber and covered in a sort of plaster which gave them the appearance of massive, classical pavilions complete with columns and domes. Disneyland is small by comparison. They held the Olympics here in the same year but it was little more than a side show.

The Cathedral is really quite new but built on very traditional Romanesque lines with mosaic covered domes. It’s impressive but oddly un-enthralling. Well, to me at least. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood after a long and fruitless wait for a bus to get there.

The bus I eventually caught from the Cathedral to Downtown dropped me near Union Station, once one of the busiest train stations in the country. Now it’s a hotel and shopping mall and really rather shit. Trains now leave from a characterless shed a few blocks away. The demise of railway travel is one of the saddest things in this country and every attempt to reverse the decline seems to hit the buffers. We’re taking the train from here to Chicago in a few weeks’ time. Might as well while we still can.

Downtown near Union Station is bleak and grim but just a few blocks north and the city is hip and lively. Saint Louis is a beer town, thanks largely to its German immigrant roots. There used to be several big breweries in town, most of which were sucked into the Anheuser-Busch empire. They are the people who make the unspeakable gnat’s piss called Budweiser, and who are now owned by Belgians. In the last twenty-odd years several small breweries have emerged to satisfy the thirst of people who want proper beer, pre-eminent among which is Schlafly. And by golly their beer is good. We went to their Tap Room, a bar-cum-restaurant in their downtown brewery, ate really well and drank a black beer and an American Pale Ale which were knockouts. The APA is strong, about 6%, and has an extraordinary aroma of caramelised orange peel. I ate a big dish of mussels with salsa verde and fries and was a very happy camper.

Not so far away is Pappy’s Smokehouse, a good old-fashioned barbecue joint that closes when it runs out of food. The first day we tried it was the day after the Memorial Day holiday. We got there at 5.30 and they had already run out of what we were after, their spare-ribs. We made do with brisket and some turkey. We went back the next day at about 4 and secured a half rack each. They were very good but, I have to say, not as good as the sample I got from Bogart’s in Soulard, despite having the same executive chef. Bogart’s is only open at lunch from Tuesday to Saturday so there’s no two ways about it; lunch it will have to be.

I like a good diner, I do, and in the last two weeks I’ve managed to visit a few. It’s a tough gig.
Dr Jazz in Webster Grove is a terrible name for a sweet little old mom ‘n’ pop place that is more of a soda fountain than a real diner. But it has booths and stools at the counter and at the lunchtime we went they were doing a special, which was a cheeseburger with the cheese of our choice (I had pepper jack and Lucy, Swiss), fresh-cut fries and a proper milkshake, all for $6.99. The burger was juicy, the fries still had their skins on (delicious) and my shake (just vanilla ice cream wazzed with milk) was frothy and refreshing. I was very happy.
The City Diner is a twenty minute walk from our digs and has all the trappings of a 50s diner; formica tables, two-tone leatherette booths and a checkerboard floor. It’s not actually that old but it’s menu is authentic (meatloaf is its specialty) and at weekends it stays open 24 hours. We’ve been twice. The first time I tried a St Louis oddity – fried ravioli, which is as it sounds. Crispy, deep-fried ravioli are served with a marinara dipping sauce. It’s not bad. I wouldn’t order it again and I’ve yet to understand why tomato pasta sauce is called “marinara” as there’s not much that’s marine about it, but there you go. I also had a slice of rhubarb and strawberry pie “a la mode” (with a scoop of ice-cream) which was very, very good. The pastry was crisp and the filling not too sweet or gloopy.
The second time we went I had the blue plate special, a grilled chicken sandwich which was nothing to get excited about. The waiter, hearing my English accent, brought malt vinegar for me to slosh on my fries. But I didn’t use it. So there. Lucy’s tuna melt wasn’t very good at all. Not much melting going on for starters, so even though it’s a jolly enough place and the service is good, we won’t be in a rush to go back. It’s pricey for a diner too. $2.25 for diner coffee? Mm, no.
Now the Courtesy Diner, of which there are two branches, is more my speed. It’s the real deal, small, with the griddle just behind the counter in full view of the customers. Chilli ($3.95 for a small bowl) sits warming in a pot and comes served with oyster crackers and a pile of shredded cheese. It’s open 24 hours, though biscuits and gravy are available only between 11pm and 11am. Men with cowboy hats perch on the counter stools and the waitresses are perky, brisk but always polite. For a late breakfast yesterday I had a short stack of pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon, each item arriving simultaneously but on different plates. We had to wait for five minutes before we could get a seat but as soon as eleven o’clock struck, the place emptied. I’m not sure if that was because people had to get back to work or because the biscuits and gravy curfew had started. I’ll have to go back and figure it out over some steak and eggs.

Route 66 passes about one-and-a-half miles south of our digs and we drove along a few miles of the old road the other day. It’s not called 66 anymore. It shifts from 30 to 366 and then it disappears into the 44 freeway. But they still have signs telling you you’re on the old “mother road”. Even though most of the old businesses along the road have gone, I think you can still get a flavour of the old route just by the way it undulates like a gentle, tarmac roller-coaster. They wouldn’t build a new road like that anymore. There’s the odd, old bowling alley (“with Cocktail Lounge”) that I’m dying to explore, if nothing more than for a Big Lebowski moment: “a fine sarsaparilla for me and an oat soda for The Dude…”
We stopped at a St Louis landmark on Route 66: Ted Drewe’s Frozen Custard, which has been going for over 75 years. (Fellow Brits: frozen custard is what we call ice-cream, which is, er, usually frozen custard.) At a large roadside shack you can buy a mind-boggling array of flavoured “concretes” – their name for frozen custard blended with, say, M&Ms, chocolate chips, banana, Oreos… you name it. Concrete refers to the consistency. You’re not buying mush and your server briefly inverts the open cup to demonstrate its solid texture. You can also buy various sundaes including a banana split that looks quite incredible.
On a warm evening, such as when we dropped in for a large Heath bar concrete, the place is humming with families and groups of friends. They take their custards back to their pick-ups and cars, where they slurp and chat under the Ted Drewes neon sign while the traffic drifts by on America’s most famous road.

I knew this would happen. No sooner do I mouth off about the quality of chicken than I have to start backtracking on what I said. This is not to say I have eaten some good chicken since I last blogged, but I will admit that my implied generalisation – which repeated pretty-well every prejudice that Brits have about America – that the produce over here is all tasteless pap, was unfounded and unfair. You can buy just as crappy food in Britain as you can over here. I’ve seen awful meat and poultry on the shelves of all of Britain’s supermarkets, with the exception perhaps of Waitrose. I’m just irredeemably smug because when I’m at home I get to buy all of my meat from local farmers.
That smugness got a good slap across the face when we went to two farmers’ markets yesterday. The first, and by far the biggest, is a covered market in Soulard, just south of Downtown. As soon as we parked the car and wandered the streets I got that sensation, that bumping on the skin, when you realise that this is a place where you could actually choose to live. The houses are Victorian redbrick, as are the pavements. There are trees and inviting pubs and coffee shops. The market itself has been going since the 18th century and is made up of two long galleries, filled with stalls. It was a Saturday and the place was humming. A stall was selling good-looking Bloody Marys – too early for me – and was doing a roaring trade. I was already on a high because I’d just been given a taster in a smokehouse across the road called Bogarts. It is an offshoot of the very popular Pappy’s Smokehouse and if the one barbecued rib I tasted was anything to go by I’m going to have to make some frequent trips. The rib was fleshy and beautifully moist. It wasn’t dripping with sauce, just a thin layer of glaze on the top, and the smoking enhanced the flavour rather than smothered it. It was without doubt the finest piece of barbecuing I have ever tasted. Bogarts only opens at lunchtimes from Tuesday to Saturday or I think we would be there tonight. Pappy’s is also closed on Sunday evenings, more’s the pity. Both places close when they run out of food – as they always do; as simple as that, so we’ll have to go early.
The market was strong on fruit and veg, less so on meat, and not much good at all for fish (but then we are a very long way from the sea). I would call it a general market rather than specifically a farmers’ market, though a good few of the vegetable sellers were bringing produce from their own farms. But if you lived in the neighbourhood you wouldn’t have much good reason to go anywhere else for your food.
The second market we visited was in the middle of a nearby park, Tower Grove. These really were home producers and by the time we got there at about 11.30 many of them had already sold out. An interesting distinction from an English market was that anyone who was selling meat had it in freezers rather than fresh, and I can see some sense in this. For one thing it was extremely hot yesterday, but more crucially they don’t have to worry about what to do with unsold stock. Still, I’d be reluctant to buy a frozen chicken, even if it were free-range. Freezing mushes up the texture. And the things are always so wet. A good chicken should be dry when you cook it, not sopping wet. When I’ve bought chickens over here in Wholefoods, even their poshest ones have been hermetically sealed in thick plastic bags, sloshing around in water. Contrast that to a chicken that has been hung in a butcher’s. Not a drop of water to be seen.
I digress. The Tower Grove market was very good. One man was even selling “English bacon”. I quizzed him about this and we quickly established that it’s back bacon, American bacon being universally streaky. He’d sold out. He does do “cheek bacon” though, which I must try. It’s a bacony form of Bath Chaps.
As in most farmers’ markets I’ve seen in the States, everything was generally on the pricey side. I think it’s worth it, ultimately, but whereas I like to think of farmers’ markets as a way of farmers cutting out the middle man and retaining all of the retail price for themselves, sometimes there’s a danger that producers will overstep the mark so much that we’re into the area of “boutique food”, designed to appeal to people with more money than sense rather than people who just want to buy decent food straight from the people who grew it. There’s a store I visited today called Local Harvest. It claims to source as much of its food as possible from local producers. They have two labels which you can find on some products. One says 150 and the other 300, and each refers to the maximum amount of miles something has travelled. Quite apart from the fact that I don’t consider 150 miles to be exactly local, I could see very few items which carried the stickers. Most of the stock, I’m sorry to say, was stuff you’d see at any health food store. Their strawberries, albeit organic, came from Driscolls, the largest supplier of soft fruit in the USA. A bunch of three small beetroot, with the leaves still attached (which I often use instead of spinach), was $3.99. That’s about £2.40. For one portion of beets. As well as thinking that’s just taking the piss, it highlights another problem with food pricing over here. Everything gets rounded up to the nearest 99 cents. So a producer comes along with a bunch of beets that he wants to sell to the store for $1.50 (still more than I pay for a good bunch of local beets at home). The store then doubles the price in mark-up, but rather than sell them for $3, it rounds the price up even more to $3.99. Well, that’s just bonkers and cynical. But they all do it.

These gripes aside, it’s good to know that the movement towards decent produce is as strong here as it is at home. I despaired of ever buying free-range pork here as most pigs are raised in enormous sheds, but no, you can get it. Restaurants are springing up all over town which boast of their local sourcing. Some are even getting into the nose-to-tail movement. All power to their free-range elbows.

I made Arroz Con Pollo last night, a sort of chicken paella. I’ve made it many times before. It’s easy and tasty. Well, not last night it wasn’t. We got all the ingredients at a local supermarket, Schnucks. It’s generally a good store that caters well for the local community and which takes care to stock foods that appeal to every ethnic background. We bought onion, garlic, green peppers, short grain rice, tinned chicken broth, fresh plum tomatoes, paprika and chicken thighs. Nothing odd, no funny spice mixes, no pre-packaged shortcuts (except for the broth I suppose). I cooked it up as I always do, frying the chicken first in olive oil, then the vegetables and paprika, adding the stock then rice… I let it rest for ten minutes before serving. It looked good but tasted of nothing. The chicken was awful with no flavour whatsoever. We had looked for a free range bird but in vain, and this was the best we could do.

I wish I could say I’m surprised, but I’m not. Just very disappointed. The very strange thing is that the rest of it had no flavour to speak of either. The onions, garlic, peppers, paprika and broth had achieved nothing. It’s no wonder that Colonel Sanders has to lather his chicken in a gazillion spices, a ton of salt (sugar too II’ll wager) and breadcrumbs then deep fry it, because without all the extra crap the meat itself would taste of nothing.

I wonder how many Americans, or Brits for that matter, when they say “it tastes of chicken” actually know what chicken tastes like?

For foodies, a quick run-down of eateries so far…

Crown Candy Kitchen is a candy store cum soda fountain cum diner which opened in 1913 and which hasn’t changed dramatically since. There are only a few booths, more like tiny wooden cubicles, and if there are more than four of you, you might as well head elsewhere. Likewise if you don’t like queuing for a table you might as well head elsewhere. The extraordinary thing about this is that Crown Candy is in a pretty desolate corner of town, north of Downtown. Millions of dollars have just been spent by the city in at attempt to rejuvenate the area and nearby there are lots of old stores that have been spiffily renovated but which currently stand empty, waiting to be occupied by boutiques and art galleries. Personally I wish they were becoming shops that actually serve the immediate neighbourhood, like bakeries and butchers, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Anyway, the fare at Crown Candy is basic stuff but good. I had a Ruben, which is a toasted corned beef sandwich with sauerkraut and thousand island dressing. The beef is what we Brits called salt beef rather than the stuff from Fray Bentos. The sandwich came with chips (crisps) and a long, salty pickle. However the main courses are merely the prologue to what Crown Candy is really about. Sundaes, shakes and malts (basically a milkshake thickened with malt powder – Ovaltine?) are the reason you can’t get a table. I would have had a malt if my birthday-boy heart wasn’t already on a sundae. At 24 fluid ounces (one-and-a-half wimpy American pints) each their malts are massive. They have a challenge that has stood since 1913: if you can drink five malts within half an hour you get them free. Only an idiot would try that which is why the bloke off the ludicrous US TV show “Man vs Food” has attempted it. I have no idea if he succeeded and frankly I don’t care. As I wrote on this blog back in August, the idea that the enjoyment of food is to be had solely in stuffing as much of the stuff inside your face as you possibly can is so revolting that the show’s presenter should be struck down with the heart attack he so richly deserves.
I had the Crown Sundae and jolly good it was too. Two scoops of excellent homemade ice-cream of my choosing, topped with chocolate fudge sauce, pecans, whipped cream and a cherry. I surprised myself by choosing the cherry ice-cream – not normally a flavour I’d plump for – but I’m glad I did as it was very, very good, the cherries large and, well, fruity.

Shaw’s Coffee in The Hill, from where I blogged yesterday, is a real find. There is a large roaster right in the middle of the cafe and when they have a roasting session, as they did yesterday afternoon, the doors are flung open and the street fills with with the smell of the the hot beans. Lucy met me after her rehearsal and we wandered down to Amighetti’s, an Italian cafe and bakery that is something of a local institution. I couldn’t resist the spaghetti with meatballs – as good a barometer of an American-Italian eatery as anything – and for seven bucks got an enormous portion that I couldn’t finish, quite. There were four meatballs nearly the size of cricket balls. But they were very good, and every time I said “that’s it I’m done” I found myself having another forkful a couple of minutes later.
Despite my distended belly we couldn’t resist wandering into their bakery shop after lunch and buying a couple of cannoli “for later”. We ate them today and they were much better than you get from Roma in New York, the pastry lighter and the ricotta less cloying.

Finally I have to mention World’s Fair Donuts, just east of The Hill. It’s an old nondescript looking place, barely more than a shack, but it’s charming and, dare I say it, quaint. But not in a self-conscious or deliberate way. Apparently the same people have been working there for the last 30 years or so and they open at four in the morning. It might sound silly to say it’s nice to meet a donut seller who’s passionate about his work but that’s the impression he certainly gave when we stopped for a glazed ring and a glazed-cake. There was an old biddy in front of us who had stepped out of an old Lincoln with Arkansas plates – perhaps she had spotted the shop from the freeway and told her husband (a Vietnam veteran – it said so on his licence plate) to pull over for a box of treats – who was umming and aahing about what to chose, and the server described each nut in turn with what I can only call good old-fashioned courtesy and patience. My glazed ring, perhaps not the most original of choices, was superb. Much better than a Krispy Kreme. It was firmer and less gratingly sweet. I’m going to have to go back. Apparently the buttermilk donuts are to die for and how can I resist a “fried pie”, the size and shape of a small pasty, filled with jam or custard? I adore these old businesses and would happily pay over-the-odds to give them my custom, but you get two top-notch donuts for a dollar and who can argue with that?