(c) 2012 Topps

And take your restaurant with you, mang!

​Pujols 5 Westport Grill (342 Westport Plaza, Maryland Heights; 314-439-0595) is no more. With Albert Anaheim-bound, the owners of the restaurant bearing his name and number announced today that, effective immediately, it will be known as the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame Bar & Grill, which is, we're sorry, just a terrible, terrible name.

Never fear: Gut Check and some of our Twitter friends, have come up with some much better names.

If the owners are intent on the Hall of Fame angle, we have two suggestions.

- Combine the Hall of Fame and bar & grill concepts more efficiently: The St. Louis Sports Hall of Flame.

- Or, as nod to both Albert's new team and geographical correctness, former Gut Check contributor Dave Nelson suggests calling it The St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame of Maryland Heights.

Of course, Albert isn't the only beloved Cardinal. Why not embrace one of them? You could name the restaurant...

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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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​As we told you yesterday, Clayton Restaurant Week runs from Monday, January 23, through Sunday, January 29. Participating restaurants have three-course prix-fixe menus for $25, tax and tip excluded. You can see the full list of those restaurants and their menus on the official Clayton Restaurant Week website.

To save you time, I've looked over all of those menus and selected the five that I think have the most promise of giving you maximum bang for your twenty-five bucks. This is no guarantee that the meals will be stellar, of course, but these restaurants seem to have gone above and beyond in offering multiple choices -- interesting choices -- for each course.

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Kaylen Wissinger

​To help guide our readers through National Soup Month, Gut Check's counting down 15 of our favorite local soups. From light and healthy pho to hearty bisques and chowders, we'll lead you (belly first, of course) to some mighty fine liquid dinners.

And while it's all good, delicious fun to eat our way through our favorites, we'd be remiss not to apprise you, our Dear Reader, of the minefield of horrifying soups that lie in wait for the unsuspecting slurper. With very little effort (a Gut Check specialty) we were able to uncover ten soups so repulsive that not even your cast-iron-gutted correspondent wouldn't go near 'em with a ten-foot ladle.

Our timing couldn't be better, if Gut Check does say so ourself. The recently arrived cold snap (and its attendant, improbable One-Inch Snowpocalypse) will no doubt lead to a run on the soup aisle at your go-to grocery store. But when you enter the fray to stock up, you'll be armed with the knowledge you'll need in order to make smart soup decisions under pressure. (You're welcome.)

10. Cream of Celery It's hard to imagine celery, a stringy stalk composed of 10 percent dental floss and 90 percent water, coexisting happily with cream. So hard that it makes us want to vomit.

9. Chicken Corn Chowder (flavored with bacon) What does it mean to be flavored with bacon? According to the label we read on the Progresso can before hastily sticking it back on the shelf, it means that amid the bucketload of ingredients, bacon is way, way, way, way down the list. So far down, in fact, that the manufacturer is compelled (by law, no doubt) to note that despite the prominent billing on the label, bacon makes up "less than 2 percent" of this soup. Gut Check takes a dim view of bacon teases.

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​Hostess Brands filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week, the second time in eight years that the maker of Twinkies, Wonder Bread and a score of other sweet cakes and enriched breads has sought such protection.

Gut Check greeted the news with the expected smirk -- aren't Twinkies supposed to last forever? -- but then experienced a rare moment of self-reflection. Sure, we can (and do) mock Twinkies as an example of everything that is wrong with American eating habits, a Frankenstein of high fructose corn syrup and 36 other ingredients, but we also ate the hell out of some Twinkies back when we were in our food-critic training pants.

Won't the culture lose something if Hostess can't rescue itself again and Twinkies disappear? Aren't Twinkies, for all their culinary sins, a vital artifact of 20th-century America?

We thought this. And then we watched some vintage commercials for Twinkies and other Hostess products. Now we're just terrified.

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​To be frank: This was an odd list to compile. If 2012 continues the trend begun in 2011, St. Louis will welcome many new restaurants over the next twelve months, so singling out only five of them as the "most anticipated" seems silly. What's more, many of the restaurants that will open in the new year aren't even rumors yet, let alone confirmed news, so a year from now, we might wonder how we couldn't have anticipated this or that smash hit.

Still, we do know some of the restaurants slated to open their doors in the coming months, and for various reasons, these five stand out among them.

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Jennifer Silverberg

The "Hot Mama" wings at O! Wing Plus: 2011 was a good year for wing fans.

​This week, I counted down my top ten dishes for 2011, a list drawn mostly (though not entirely) from restaurants that opened this year. In October, I ranked the five best new restaurants in St. Louis for 2011 and awarded an honorable mention to five more new restaurants.

Even accounting for the overlap between the two lists, they cover a lot of ground. Still, as Gut Check closes the books on 2011, I thought I'd mention a few more restaurants and restaurant trends from the past twelve months of reviews worthy of note.

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​For some folks, Christmas is a day of mandatory family time in celebration of some cool old cat's birthday, and for others, it's an ever-annoying nuisance that means little to them except that there's nothing to do. But there's one thing we all have in common: We gotta eat.

-Demun Oyster Bar is open Christmas eve, 5 p.m.-midnight. Open Christmas day at 7 p.m., bar only.

-All Pi locations are open on Christmas Eve, and the Delmar location opens at 1 p.m. Christmas Day.

-Local Harvest is open Christmas Eve for brunch, closing at 2 p.m.

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​Update: A Norwegian blogger named Tommy recently posted a vlog where he expressed disgust at Americans who've been taking the crisis lightly. We're also pretty sure he calls us fat, and he mentions something about Norwegians eating cats. Check out the video after the jump.

Norway done goofed this year, hopping on the Atkins diet craze about 10 years late and depleting a lot of the available butter in the area. Low-carb, high-fat diets throughout the year paired with a rainy summer that affected livestock feed and milk production has left Nordic grocery stores looking like Paula Deen's worst nightmare. This is a problem, because, well, Norwegians want cookies on Christmas, too.

Butter is so scarce that online auctions are selling it at five times the usual amount, the equivalent of almost $12 for a single stick. A Russian smuggler was also caught last week with 200 pounds of butter in the trunk of his car as he passed into Norway.

Given the current butter crisis (tragedy, catastrophe, disaster, etc.) in Norway, Gut Check has compiled a list of our favorite buttery treats to pack up and ship over to all our Norwegian friends this holiday season.

6. Orange Cream Sugar Cookies
We found this recipe from an online contest seeking recipes that portray a "successful use of butter as a main ingredient." This recipe certainly does just that, with a cookie consisting of a ratio of one cup butter to three cups flour, and a similar icing that calls for one cup butter to three cups powered sugar. That's two cups of butter total, the same as four whole sticks.

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sogoodblog.com

Should this be the new face of Olive Garden?

​This week the Wall Street Journal reported some downer news regarding Olive Garden's business woes. Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden, forecast a dismal prediction that Olive Garden's sales will continue to plummet if it doesn't find new ways to attract more customers.

Can you say, "Gut Check to the rescue!"?

We've compiled a list of suggestions guaranteed to perk up the numbers at Olive Garden.

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