Does Larry Conners Have to Tase a Bartender?

​After four years as a restaurant critic, I can count the number of celebrities -- local, even, let alone national -- I've spotted while dining on one hand. There was the night Joe Buck strolled past my table at F15teen. He was taller -- and, according to my wife, more handsome -- than you might expect.

And that was it...until a few days ago, when I visited Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse at the new River City Casino and was seated near KMOV news anchor Larry Conners.

Conners, his wife and a few friends seemed to be having a lovely time at the restaurant. (Which, by the way, serves absolutely top-notch steak; more on that next week.) Conners looked tanned and fit in a black button-down shirt. He sipped scotch or maybe whiskey on the rocks.

But then he summoned the server. Was there a problem?

Oh, indeed.

"My drink," said Conners in the stentorian voice that he would usually reserve for reporting the latest city homicide or maybe admonishing co-anchor Vickie Newton for those cable-channel ads where she implores you to change the channel at ten o'clock to watch KMOV's late news, "isn't brown enough."

His wife's martini wasn't strong or cold or strong and cold enough either, apparently, because both drinks were whisked away and replaced shortly thereafter. The server apologized profusely and offered some kind of excuse about the warm weather and ice melting more quickly than it usually does.

Was Conners' new drink brown enough? Put it this way: Would you dare argue with a man who had himself tased on the air? Hell, I would've served him half a bottle of Everclear, neat, and comped the whole thing.