Side Dish

Lots of recent and upcoming openings to report on the local scene:

St. Louis' favorite pre-Rams tight end, Jackie Smith, is returning to his roots with Jackie Smith's Louisiana Café, scheduled to open later this year in the space near the corner of Clayton and Clarkson roads that formerly housed The Gallery and one of the Patrick's restaurants. The ground floor of the old Fair Mercantile store, at Shaw Avenue and Edwards Street on the Hill, will soon be home to Modesto Tapas, which means, somewhat ironically, that a town that only a couple of years ago had no tapas to speak of will now have two tapas restaurants within six blocks of each other on the same street.

Just around the corner, over on Daggett Avenue, on the other end of the block from the revived Rigazzi's, John Rice, who ran Colorado, which was adjacent to the St. Louis University campus until it was assimilated by the Borg, is exploring a new frontier with a restaurant called Space. Over on Hampton Avenue and down a ways, at the intersection with Fyler Avenue, an old Pizza Hut location has a new life with the cleverly ironic name of Tandoori Hut, no doubt serving a house condiment called "hutney." Finally, if you haven't recently visited Harry's on Market Street, the now three-times-bigger deck, with its picture-postcard view of Union Station and downtown, is now open, and the chilled watermelon soup is like sipping summertime.