St. Louis Food Blog

The clear winner of my group was the flan. I love flan like Heloise loved Abelard, though I doubt she ever hoisted him over her head in an international grocery store and did an impromptu tap dance down the aisle. While definitely not the same push-yield texture as its homemade kin, this flan had a spongy layer where the normally-drippy and unsneakable caramel sauce had sunk into its gelatinous foot, improving its sneakability. The flan comes in a plastic dish, completely sealed with a foil wrapper. One person could eat the portion, but it might be better for two, especially with other snacks being snuck. I could have fit at least a dozen of these in my coat pockets and it still would have cost less than two tickets.

We have dessert and coffee at Eclipse, the restaurant in the Moonrise Hotel, where Dad was the very first guest to stay in his particular room. He orders some amazing thing with ice cream and sauce and all manner of completely unsneakable garnishes. I order a compact, brilliantly textured homemade moon pie covered in rich chocolate ganache. So delicious. So sneakable. I eat it quietly, imagining all the places I could take it for want of some wax paper and the courage to tell my father what kind of deviant I am. I suffer.

Perched on top of those two boxes was a smaller box with my neeps. I have no shame in admitting I ordered the neeps because I had no idea what they were but liked the sound they made. I chose the Scottish Arms both for its obvious connection to a certain engineering genius who, despite protests to the contrary, can change the laws of physics and for the fact that I don't know much about Scottish food. I wanted to enjoy a new direction in a franchise that was all about new directions by boldly eating where I had not gone before. I felt fairly certain that popular culture and a descriptive menu had warned me of the pitfalls of the cuisine and the very helpful bartender was able to answer my questions about what was in various sides.

1) The meal must be sneakable.

2) The meal must consist entirely of things that were in my apartment 48 hours before preparation began.

3) No sandwiches. Sandwiches are cheating.

Them: Oh, that's interesting! What kinds of food do you sneak in?

Sneak: All kinds. Everything.

Them: Really? What's the most difficult thing you've snuck in somewhere?

Sneak: A bottle of champagne/a four-course meal/sushi for four. (This changes, depending on my mood.)

Them (stunned by lack of Swedish Fish, Diet Coke): Oh! That's...you're really serious about that.

Sneak: Deadly serious.

Them: Well, what about ice cream? Can you sneak in ice cream?

Aztec warrior, presumably not about to be electrocuted.

- He's become the stuff of high-school legend by sneaking up to a truck full of 16-year-old boys (intent on drinking their way through a cooler in what they thought was an empty field) and drawing his piece on them. In any given horror movie, underage drinking in a bucolic setting gives you a 50% chance of Jason Voorhees impaling you on a tree and a 50% chance of my pistol-packin' dad asking to see your license and making you pour out your beer.

- He's been the filling in a collision sandwich between a stone wall and the front of an Oldsmobile. It crushed his Miata like a beer can on a DZ pledgemaster's forehead, but he climbed out of the top of the car and asked the elderly lady in the offending land yacht if she was all right or needed him to call an ambulance for her.

- He was moderately electrocuted in an Aztec gold mine.