Esca is a frontrunner for best new restaurant. Chef Ben Poremba’s 2024 is just beginning. (2024)

Ben Poremba is the busiest chef in St. Louis right now — but not too busy to tout the butter service at his two-month-old restaurant Esca.

“You need bread,” he observed as I speared tender escargot from glistening pools of pastis-drunk butter strewn with breadcrumbs.

I did need bread to sop up all that seasoned butter on my escargot plate. I didn’t need more butter. Wisely, I kept the latter thought to myself, and with my bread Poremba brought me a modest swipe of the luscious house-churned butter displayed in a towering swirl like Mr. Softee’s coif in a brass cauldron in Esca’s dining room.

Yes, butter service sounds like a leftover joke from the “Portlandia” era of American restaurants. At Esca, it is just one of the many details that make for a sensational experience, the early frontrunner for the best new restaurant of 2024.

Poremba opened Esca in late March in the Delmar Maker District, the burgeoning area along Delmar Boulevard in the Central West End and Academy neighborhoods that is home to Third Degree Glass Factory, Craft Alliance and MADE Makerspace.

Already one of St. Louis’ most ambitious chefs, Poremba has placed the sort of bet on this district that gets you a comped hotel suite and front-row tickets to Adele’s casino residency. Esca is the first of his two new restaurants here. Debuting this weekend across the street is the Tel Aviv, Israel-inspired cafe Florentin.

Poremba is also moving a trio of his established restaurants — his flagship duo of the fine-dining Elaia and the adjacent, more casual Olio as well as his Mexican concept Nixta — to the Delmar Maker District from Botanical Heights. (The original locations of all three closed at the end of 2023.) Beyond the district, over the past two years he has opened the Spanish restaurant Bar Moro in Clayton and Deli Divine in the West End. He has revamped the menu of the Benevolent King in Maplewood from Moroccan-inspired fare to sushi.

Among these many varied projects — eight, if you’re counting; nine, if that count includes his Botanical Heights market and cafe AO&Co.; 10, if you add the new AO&Co. outpost inside the Contemporary Art Museum — Esca demands attention. It carries itself with the confidence you would expect from a veteran restaurateur and the all-star team he has assembled in its kitchen, behind its bar and on its floor, including wine and service director Luciano Racca, who curates the extensive wine and spirits program.

Esca’s energy, though, is refreshingly uncynical, maybe even naïve in our convenience-driven post-pandemic dining era. It still believes in the transportive magic of restaurants.

The cuisine is “coastal Mediterranean,” a broad category the kitchen honors in the breach. (Are those classic escargots de Bourgogne from the coast of France? Should anyone but a geography pedant care?) What truly defines Esca’s cooking is the charcoal-fired oven and grill at the heart of its open kitchen. From the famed Spanish manufacturer Josper, this grill is equally gorgeous and imposing, an engine and a hearth. Unsurprisingly, the crust it put on my impeccably medium-rare steak was as dark and smoky as the bark on a Texas brisket.

Also, unsurprisingly, Poremba and his team understand the nuances of live-fire cooking. Snappy asparagus is brushed with char as delicately as if the embers were slivers of butter. Fire-roasted strawberries, their sweetness focused by the heat to a point riper than ripe, practically melt into a pool of creamy stracciatella cheese.

This latter dish showcases Poremba’s inimitable style: a “snack,” as the menu categorizes it, as deliberately effusive in its plating as a Jackson Pollock canvas. This arrangement of stracciatella and strawberries is lashed with syrupy saba, studded with almonds and charged with tiny pops of black pepper. On the side for dipping, spreading, or eating by itself are pieces of carte de musica, a crackling, hearth-baked semolina flatbread.

Esca’s appeal spills over into dishes you might otherwise skim past. I didn’t think I needed another take on hamachi crudo, but in addition to the expected pairing of raw fish and citrus, Poremba tops the dish with a generous garnish of slivered almond, adding crunch and a persistent savor. Rather than traditional beef tartare, Esca features the Italian version with lighter, sweeter veal. For extra swagger, the kitchen tosses mortadella into the finely diced mix. Even a straightforward salad of homegrown lettuces with grated Pecorino is dressed in a striking, charcoal-tinged vinaigrette.

To a degree I haven’t experienced at Poremba’s many restaurants over the years, a primal simplicity anchors the menu. A piece of charcoal-grilled branzino appears nearly naked on its plate. Only after tasting the tender, smoky flesh do you realize a bright olive-pistachio tapenade is hiding underneath the fish. Likewise, precisely grilled chicken — crisp skin, juicy meat — needs no more accent than herbs de Provence and its own silky jus, poured tableside.

Dessert imbues a selection of classics with subtle personal touches. For the affogato, your server pours a shot of espresso over a cup of housemade gelato. The pavlova presents strawberries and ethereal cream on meringue baked that day by Poremba’s mother, Rachel.

Esca’s format — a sharing-friendly menu largely divided between snacks and appetizers, with the few grilled main courses and a-la-carte side dishes like the aforementioned asparagus or polenta di riso, rice grits gone swanky with melted cheese — most resembles Poremba’s Olio. Esca’s vibe is something else entirely, though, sophisticated, even sexy, but as relaxed and breezy as its Riviera inspiration. If anything, it reminds me of the late Soulard French restaurant Franco, one of the best and most effortlessly grown-up restaurants of the past two decades.

Whether Esca will prove to be Poremba’s “best” restaurant awaits the reopening of his great and unapologetically forward-thinking Elaia. For now, I can say unequivocally Esca is my favorite of all the restaurants he has opened.