Bob's Top Three Picks

The following are my top picks from the past year.  These are not straightforward picks of restaurants that were better than others.  One was just surprisingly good and I had never been there.  The other was a leisurely, comfortable dining experience, and the other has really good beer.

They are also not ranked...so the order does not mean anything.  This was hard, because there were so many fantastic places...and I have no deli's in there, which seems a shame to me.  But so be it.

I also had a difficult time picking just three, so I've compiled two lists.  The first is restaurants in the traditional sense.  The other is of places that aren't traditional eateries.

So for my top three favorite eateries, I choose:

Anthoninos

2nd Shift Brewery

Guidos

For my top three favorite places (non-restaurant) this past year, I choose:

Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate

Gaslight Studio

Missouri Baking


You can click on each of the names above to see the posts we did about them.

Honorable mentions go to:

Gioia's Deli
Joe Fassi's Sausage and Sandwich Factory
Pop's Blue Moon

Giro! Giro! Giro!

Here is the long-awaited Labor Day post; that isn’t so much about Marconi Bakery, but more about the Giro della Montanga.

Ok, let’s get the food part out of the way.

We knew from the start that our Marconi Bakery visit would happen in September because of The Gateway Cup timing. Luckily Marconi Bakery happens to sell pizza in addition to bread and pastries.

Bob had the I’m-gonna-have-all-the meat-that-Mel-doesn’t-let-me-eat pizza. And I had, wait for it, the veggie.  Most notable part of lunch was dining with some out-of-town racers, including a 15 year old young lady. They come to Saint Louis every year for fun as much, or more, than the racing. Our conversation lasted longer than the pizza did.

A couple more food things.

Every year we look forward to the arancini balls from the Saint Ambrose Parish Church. And new this year, Urban Chestnut Brewing Company beer. In the past, it was Bud, Bud Light and Shocktop.

So a fun UCBC story. At the previous day’s race, I volunteered as a course monitor – meaning I got to stop people from crossing the road. Amazing what power a flag and a vest provides. “None shall pass!”

As folks wearing UCBC shirts walked by, I casually mentioned how warm it was. And voila! Ten minutes later I was holding a Zwickel. I chuckled as the volunteer coordinator offered a water while I was holding said beer.

I volunteered at the Giro della Montanga too. And guess what happened. The UCBC guy walked past and said, “Hey, I remember you,” and kept going. Ten minutes later, I had Zwickel.

One more UCBC story. The next day I didn’t volunteer, but I still had some beer drinking to do. The UCBC guy recognized me again and wanted to give me more beer. “But I’m not working today.” “You helped out before, have another beer.” So I took it and put the five bucks in the tip jar.

Back to The Hill and the Giro della Montanga.

The Giro della Montanga began in 1986 as a single bike race. The Giro became the cornerstone of the Gateway Cup in 1998. The Hill continues this great sporting event and looks forward to many more years of Giro, Giro, Giro!  

Many Hill restaurants support the Gateway Cup:

Urban Chestnut Brewing Company (Super Sponsor!)

J. Smugs Gastro Pit

Mama's on The Hill

Volpi Foods

Favazza's

The Hill neighborhood also joins in on the fun:

Believe me, this is quite a hill they are climbing

There you have it, my final post of A Hill of a Year. And my final foray into blogging. It didn't take long to figure out it's more fun to eat out than to write about it.

Mining the Data...

I find it interesting that that there are a lot of different data that can be gathered from this blog service about the folks that look at your blog.  Not surprising....I guess if we were trying to make money or sell something from this blog, this type of data would be valuable.  To me it is a curiosity.

So, here are some of the data that I found interesting.

The post with the most views is Stop Me If You've Heard this One. This post had 227 "pageviews".  Not surprising because the lede involved a Catholic gradeschool's boy's soccer team and diseased hookers.

The post with the second amount of "pageviews" is Joey B's with some Homies.  This one was viewed 205 times.

And coming in third for "pageviews" is: Three Glorious Words.  About the Chocolate Factory on "The Hill."  This one had 175 looks.

Other data that I found interesting is that by far the vast majority of our viewers came to us through Facebook.  In fact nearly 3,000 views of our blog were through Facebook.  There were a few general searches through Yahoo and Bing and Google, but the vast majority were through Facebook.

Also, not surprising, is that the vast majority of folks viewed us from the United States.  Somewhat surprising, but maybe not after this past year, is that the second most "pageviews" came from Russia!  We had 24 views from Canada, 19 from the United Kingdom, 10 from Germany, 9 from Costa Rica, 7 from Ireland, 7 from the Northern Mariana Islands, 4 from Switzerland, 6 from Madagascar and 3 from Singapore... and a few from Thailand and Peru.  I can, interestingly enough account for all of these views....but the Russian ones, I can honestly claim that there was no collusion.

3,080 views (that's 60% of all views) came through Chrome web browser, while 1,241 (or 24%) came through mobile sources.

While were on the topic of mobile, 2,199 (43%) of those views were from Android devices, while 1,541 (30%) were from iPhones.  There were a few Windows and even Linux devices mixed in there with others to fill out the rest, but those two were the bulk.

That's the rough breakdown of the Hill of a Year Blog for the past year.

Mission Accomplished!

We did it!

Thirty-three places in one year, in one neighborhood.  All locally owned and each one unique.  What a trip.

One thing ardent followers of this blog may notice (Are there any ardent followers of this blog?) is that we have two left to blog about.  I'll cover the final resturant in this post.  Mel will cover a place we visited way back in September, in her own time, at some future unspecified date...maybe.  Every time I ask her about this post, she laconically states, "I just haven't put my mind to it."

So Charlie Gittos.  We saved this for the final one as it is one of the more ritzy places in The Hill neighborhood.  It was a bit of a celebration for us.

In addition to this meal accomplishing our "Hill of a Year" goal, we also accomplished some other goals. We repayed a favor, and took a good friend along and met new friend.  Dr. Fidy and Liz joined us for a lovely evening earlier this month.

As expected, the wait staff was very attentive and extremely helpful. And, as one of the places on The Hill that claims to be the birthplace of Toasted Ravioli, our server encouraged us to try theirs.  So we did.  You can see some of the origin stories of T-Rav's by clicking on this text.

Charlie Gitto's menu is well balanced and not overwehlming, and there were a few specials offered that evening. You can see it here.

Each of us had a different meal.  Mel, of course, got the Eggplant Napoleon.  This is layers of breaded eggplant fried, filled with layers of Charlie Gittos special blend of cheeses, roasted sweet peppers, pesto, pomodoro and Asiago cream.

I got the Chicken Saltimbocca.

Here's some pictures of the other dishes for those of you intersted in pictures of other people's food.

It was all very good.

To top it all off...the final dining experience in our "Hill of a Year" ...we got the cannoli.  Oh my, this was good.  The shells are made at Missouri Baking (the first place we ate at in our "Hill of a Year" adventure....way back on January 6th), and then Charlie Gitto's fills them with their own special filling.  It was a perfect way to finish our year of dining out.

Keep in mind that our goal was to eat at every place in "The Hill" neighborhood in 2017.  It was not to blog about it all within the calendar year.  So we can proudly state, "Mission Accomplished," with this post.  And who knows...Mel may "put her mind to it" within the few days remaining in the year.

And now for the obligatory Mel and Bob pic in front of the joint.

It certainly has been a "Hill of a Year!"