Melissa Hamilton

​What makes Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones & Butter stand out so supremely from the pack of shoulda-coulda-wanna been-there-done-that food memoirs? The simple answer is that she's a badass. And a really good writer.

Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune, an intimately idiosyncratic restaurant in New York City. She and her book have been mentioned in the same garlic-scented breath as Anthony Bourdain, and it's understandable why. Her story of love, family and other miscellaneous crimes is as raw, honest and gutsy as any Kitchen Confidential, but the telling in Blood, Bones & Butter isn't laced with testosterone-driven kitchen horror shows. It's more about the hunger that drives a person's coming of age, one that just happens to be fueled by a life in the arduous arena of restaurant work.

She will read from and sign copies of Blood, Bones & Butter on Monday, January 30, at 7 p.m. at Left Bank Books' downtown St. Louis store (321 North Tenth Street; 314-436-3049).

In the frontispiece of Blood, Bones & Butter, there's an illustration of a bloody asparagus on a paper towel. What's the story with that?

Oh, I have a cutting on my arm -- you know, it's one of the "body modification" arts if you want to call it that--

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​ Friday (Jan. 27):

Oyster and Crab Leg Festival @ Broadway Oyster Bar
Enjoy Gulf oysters at the peak of their sweet goodness in addition to crab legs from Alaska in special dishes such as barbecue adobo oysters, thai sesame oysters, fried crab stuffed oysters and dungeness crab. Friday, January 27 and Saturday, January 28.

Third Annual Clayton Restaurant Week @ Clayton fine dining restaurants
Catch the tail end of this week-long way to sample plenty of Clayton's finest eateries through Sunday, Jan. 29. 20 restaurants including Bar Napoli, Cardwell's Mad Tomato, Tani Sushi Bistro and more feature 3 course meals for only $25. Visit the Clayton Restaurant week Web site for menus, hours and reservations.

Port Day @ a computer near you
The Center for Wine Origins hosts an inaugural social media event focusing on port wine. Participate by blogging, tweeting, post and sharing thoughts with the #PortDay hashtag to learn more about this unique wine from Portugal.

Saturday (Jan. 28):

Fête de Glace @ Main Street in St. Charles
This festival of ice features ice carving competitions between groups as well as individuals. Vote for your favorites over a cup of hot cocoa. Free. Contests start at 9:30 a.m. with an awards ceremony at 3:30 p.m.

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​- O'Shay's Pub is just about ready to go at 4353 Manchester Avenue (previously home to Newstead Tower Public House) in the Grove district of Forest Park Southeast. Look for an opening early next week, after final state approvals. Get a sneak peek at the O'Shay's menu on the restaurant's website.

- Just down the street in the Grove, paper is up in the windows at 4317 Manchester, formerly the home of Flavors BBQ Sports Bar & Grill and, before that, the original location of Five Bistro. No indication yet what, if anything, might be going in there. More as we learn it.

- A little birdie tells us that a very, very big (birdie's characterization, not ours) new buffet called Tokyo Buffet is slated to open in the same University City strip mall that houses the very, very big (our characterization) Seafood City supermarket.

- We're also hearing that an as-yet-unnamed "American" buffet will open at Olive Boulevard and McKnight Road, not very far from this week's reviewed restaurant, Dao Tien Vietnamese Bistro.

Jennifer Silverberg

The onion soup at Brasserie by Niche

​All month Gut Check has been counting down our favorite St. Louis soups in honor of National Soup Month. If these fifteen standouts still aren't enough to sate your soup appetite, my 100 Favorite St. Louis Dishes features nine soups and stews for you to try. The list is after the jump.

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Bacon up that nosebleed, boy!

​OK. The main reason for this post is to get the phrase "nasal tampon" into a headline.

But as long as we have your attention and/or disgust, let's talk about one of the strangest medical studies we've come across in, well, ever.

The study, from doctors and scientists at the Detroit Medical Center and published in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngolgy (our subscription lapsed), looked at the use of cured bacon to stop prolonged nosebleeds.

Yeah, you read that right. Doctors packed a patient's nose with perfectly good* bacon to stop its bleeding.

(*Full disclosure: We don't know for a fact that it was perfectly good when it went in, but we can say with confidence that it was not perfectly good when it came out.)

The money excerpt, from a Guardian article about the study:

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Chrissy Wilmes

​We'd originally taken this photo for our soup countdown, but we ran out of space on the list due to the high volume of awesome soups in St. Louis. We still want to acknowledge this deserving dish, so guess where we ate it, and we'll reveal its identity and give you a prize pack full of coupons and gift certificates.

Rules: To be eligible, you must leave a valid e-mail address (or Twitter handle or Facebook profile URL) in the comment-entry field. One guess per e-mail address. Employees of the restaurant in question and Riverfront Times are not eligible.

Want more opportunities to win free swag? Subscribe to Tip of the Tongue, the Riverfront Times' food newsletter.

The Egg McMuffin of father-daughter moments

​Surely by now you've seen the McDonald's commercial in which a young woman having breakfast at McDonald's with her boyfriend is put on the spot by his impromptu declaration of love, so she tells him he is "the Egg McMuffin of boyfriends." From there we are treated to a litany of McMuffin metaphors for greatness -- cars, apartments, beach days, etc.

Gut Check's first instinct was to list all the food objects that would make better metaphors for greatness than an Egg McMuffin. But then we had an epiphany:

Within the category of fast-food breakfast sandwiches, the Egg McMuffin is by far the best. It's the freakin' Egg McMuffin of Egg McMuffins!

Relationships, on the other hand, are nuanced as all get-out, especially when you're talking quality.

Ipso facto, it'd be far more fitting, not to mention useful, to assemble a compendium of go-to breakfast-sandwich metaphors to deploy when the situation demands something less than absolute perfection -- be it car, beach day or boyfriend.

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​We don't know about you, but Gut Check finds it a tad...concerning...that while we're heating up a bowl of condensed chicken and stars, we're feeding our pups canned cuisine in varieties like "filet mignon," "rotisserie chicken" and "grilled steak and eggs." Yeah, yeah, we love our dogs -- forever friends and all that -- but why the hell does their food look better than our soup?

You guys are pretty sharp with this game. Most of you identified yesterday's post as soup. Specifically, it was Shop 'n Save brand Grilled Chicken & Sausage Gumbo.

After the jump, see if you can spot good eats from dog treats.

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January is National Soup Month, which makes sense, considering the first month of the year is typically marked with below-freezing temperatures, snow and slush. What's better than a delicious, hot bowl of soup on a chilly day? A delicious, hot bowl of soup that you don't have to make -- that's what. This January Gut Check will revisit some of our favorite hot soups to help guide your belly through this month-long soup celebration.

Stephanie Tolle

​When you need a soup that will put hair on your chest, you need menudo. The traditional Mexican tripe soup is hearty, earthy and, to many Americans, kinda scary. Tripe is cow's stomach -- in menudo's case, the fatty lining of the second stomach. (A cow has four!) The flavor of tripe is difficult to describe, but it has a very subtle earthiness to it, and a bit of a tang. The texture is what frightens people: that chewy, slightly rubbery, slimy texture that Americans don't want in their meat. In Mexico, however, menudo is a breakfast favorite, said to do wonders for hangovers.

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Selecting Riverfront Times' Best of St. Louis 2011 was no picnic. Choosing the winner meant several worthy candidates would go unmentioned -- until now. In this Gut Check series, we are chewing our way through notable runners up in a number of categories.

Jennifer Silverberg

​The Super Bowl is a week from Sunday, and according to a Los Angeles Times report, Americans will eat 1.25 billion wings the day of the big game. That's not a misprint. 1.25 billion wings, or 5% of America's total wing consumption for the entire year.

Gut Check loves us some wings. Here are our finalists for the best in St. Louis.

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