Gut Check heard recently that St. Louis Bread Co. intends to open a new location on the north side of Plaza Frontenac, near Brio Tuscan Grille.

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​Hat tip to the lovely and charming Deb Peterson for the scoop. The real question, beyond the blah-blah details of square footage and whether they'll offer pedicures, is whether the Frontenac location will be designated as another of the Richmond Heights-based company's pay-what-you-wish locations.

What a fine measure of local folks' generosity that'd be! A payment-optional restaurant at the metro area's most uppity-scale shopping center! Can you imagine? Surely such a scenario would test, once and for all, Gut Check's mother's assertion that "Rockefeller didn't amass his millions by telling folks to 'keep the change.'"

Will the AmEx Black Card crowd warm to the concept of throwing down a fifty to cover a six-dollar Mediterranean Veggie sandwich and all the undiluted altruism forty-four bucks can buy?

To get the lowdown, we gave Panera Bread -- the Bread Co.'s real name everywhere except St. Louis, in case you've been asleep for twenty years -- a ringy-dingy.

And the answer?

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Screenshot: www.cinemastlouis.org

​The Sneak makes a rare second appearance this week to continue her adventures at the St. Louis International Film Festival. See Tuesday's column for the first half of Round Two.

Shows: Stolen Lives, the much-hyped feature film starring local boy made mad, Jon Hamm, and Terribly Happy, the Danish Fargo.

Food: Some mysteriously bad beef jerky.

Difficulty: Surprisingly hard. Lines were long and in the open area of Plaza Frontenac in front of the theater, and a sold-out showing of Stolen Lives meant sitting in the very bright, very exposed front row.

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​Shows: Ligeia, a locally filmed, very (very) loose adaptation of the short story by Edgar Allen Poe reimagined as a Gothic thriller; Albino Farm, a slasher film that might as well be about my fears of driving to the Lake of the Ozarks.

Food: The Edgar Allen Pom, a cocktail I concocted, recipe to follow.

Difficulty: Easy. The St. Louis International Film Festival opened soft on Thursday with a single showing of An Education so the true opening night at the Tivoli was packed. I was also able to employ the special thermos my mother got me from the Missouri History Museum -- expressly because she thought it would be good for sneaking. It runs in families, people.

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​This weekend, I watched the Breeders' Cup from the hospitable living room of a dear friend, pizza in one hand, PBR in the other, yelling for some very fine horses to beat the spread. That's not particularly sneaky, though sneaking food into horse races is quite enjoyable. The topic of conversation kept coming around to how different the horses, crowd, and track facilities at Santa Anita were from our own dear Fairmount Park. The horses particularly are not the rib-addled, bow-legged, nearly-asleep ones you can take home for two grand from just over the river but rather astonishingly calibrated muscle machines a hundred generations in the making. Herein lies the overarching metaphor:

Sneaking Food Into a Regular Movie : Tuesday at Fairmount Park :: Sneaking Food Into the St. Louis International Film Festival: The Breeders' Cup

The event for which all my sneaking has prepared me -- and, hopefully, better prepared you -- begins this Thursday, November 12. Here are some tips to get you into marathon shape this week.

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This week, in lieu of her usual sneaking exploits, Dara Strickland provides a map for the aspiring and professional Sneak alike: a guide to sneaking resources and places where you can (should?) sneak.

Zoom out to see all the icons. Click on individual icons for Dara's commentary.



View Sneaky Resources in a larger map

​Pay attention: In the event of a zombie apocalypse, the information I'm about to give you may be the difference between having your cranium cracked open like the sugar crust on a crème brûlée and parlaying a considerable stash of vodka and ammo into living the good life with a harem somewhere in Montana.

The safest place you can possibly be in the event that hell runs out of space and the dead walk the earth is in a movie theater. Let's discuss.

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Dara Strickland

​The virtues of sushi as a food are significant, but its value to a sneak may be as elusive as a flying bird's reflection on a rippling pond. I've crafted these handy tables for you to compare the virtues of eating sushi in a restaurant to sneaking it into a movie theater.

                                        Sushi Sensory Input: Sight

In a Restaurant: Preparation is very important to a good chef. Rolls will be punctuated with drizzles of sauce, nigiri displayed in harmonious pairs or fanning out across the plate; chrysanthemum piles of pickled ginger and tiny blobs of wasabi complete the miniature landscape you are about to destroy with your ravening.

Snuck into a Movie: Can't see it. Even if you do, all sushi will look washed out and alarmingly blue-gray, so looking closely is not recommended.

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I was raised a Christian sneak, which may have repercussions in my evangelical fervor for spreading the gospel of eating what you want, when you want. One thing that always disappointed me about the Bible as child, though, was that Moses and David and Jesus were hard to understand. I liked Jesus best because he told the best stories -- and, honestly, my parents should have known what I was to become when I was so very interested in turning water into wine or producing loaves and fishes from rarefied air.

I thought the biggest problem with the Bible was that it didn't address my actual concerns, chiefly: What does God eat? How come all the killing's at the front of the book? Seriously, pets go to Heaven, right? What causes seasons?

In the absence of clear answers from the Bible, I filled in myself with mythology. God probably eats ambrosia and all the killing's at the front because it took a long time for Hope to work its way out of Pandora's box. Pets definitely go to heaven, but it's like pet Valhalla where they can run around all day and never get tired before a giant feast. These things were as real to me, as valid, as cosmically understandable as anything in the Bible. I had an admirably ecumenical view of theology.

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Show: St. Louis Shakespeare's cunning blood-n-gore production of Macbeth, a terrific play about terrible people.

Food: Globe Theatre Apple-Hazelnut Tart, baked by yours truly.

Difficulty: Extreme. While the initial sneak phases of repackaging the food in aluminum foil and taking it into the theater were easy, the tart recipe had to be significantly altered to be appropriate for sneaking, and even then its deliciously crumbly crust nearly blew the whole operation. Close quarters and bright lighting in the Grandel Theater also made me feel like I was being impolite by not offering my neighbor a slice.

Apples, pears, oranges, pastries, roasted meat and nuts: all things eaten and/or thrown at the actors during plays at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. A single penny dropped into a wooden box would let you stand in the yard with the rest of the groundlings for the afternoon show in the open amphitheater. Raining? Too bad, and you probably needed a bath, anyway. Illiterate? Join the club. For just a few pence more, you could get an entire meal from vendors wandering around inside the theater or from stalls set up just outside. Truly, it was a golden age of the nexus of eating and entertainment.

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Show: Unknown Hinson, psychobilly musician/vintage vampire performance artist extraordinaire, in an intimate show at Mad Art Gallery. As an extra-awesome bonus, the fine and talented ladies of the Alley Cat Revue provided a burlesque warm-up with typical wit and inventiveness.

Food: Bread pudding with bourbon sauce from Frazer's Restaurant & Lounge.

Difficulty: Thwarted! The problem, dear Brutus, was not our stars or in ourselves, but in service slower than Johnny Cash's phrasing on "Hurt." More on that in a bit, because it still makes me mad.

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