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CAFE
[REVIEW]
Looking Good, Feeling Fine Timothy’s the Restaurant brings a twist on traditional upscale dining to Creve Coeur Written by
CHERYL BAEHR Timothy’s the Restaurant, 12710 Olive Boulevard, Creve Coeur; 314786-5301. Tues.-Sat. 4-10 p.m. (Closed Sunday and Monday.)
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itting at a black-tableclothed six-top inside Timothy’s elegant, dimly lit dining room sometime between the lobster pot pie and Caesar salad course, a flash of gold caught my eye. Roughly five inches long, the narrow metallic object was not merely a means to rid my table of puff-pastry crumbs, but a flashback. It had been years since I’d seen a crumber used in a restaurant — probably a decade and a half ago that one last graced my table, and not many more before that when, as a fine-dining server coming up in the late 1990s, the simple tool was considered a part of the uniform as essential as black non-slip shoes and a stiff white button-up. At some point, this changed. Bar towels subbed in for napkins, meatloaf showed up on every high-end menu, indie fast-casual spots became hubs of culinary innovation and food writers waxed on about the death of fine dining. Places that used crumbers, it seemed, became as much relics of dining past as the small gilded tools themselves. Steven Manns, Timothy Metz and Shawn Olson disagreed with that sentiment. This past August, the three business partners opened Timothy’s as an unapologetic homage to the way they love to eat, crumbers and all. Located in a small storefront inside a
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RIVERFRONT TIMES
Chef-owner Tim Metz. | MABEL SUEN larger strip mall in Creve Coeur, Timothy’s is their love song to the quintessential fine-dining experience that they’ve found so difficult to come by in recent years — one that brought them together in the first place. Those seeds that would become Timothy’s were planted several years ago at Herbie’s in the Central West End. There, Manns worked as a lead server and would always take care of Metz and Olsen when they would come in for dinner. The three developed a friendship that eventually flourished outside of the restaurant; whether going out to eat or putting on elaborate dinner parties at their houses, food, drinks and hospitality were at the center of everything they did. The more the friends engaged with their passion for food, the more Metz got into cooking. Completely self-taught, he began experimenting in his home kitchen a couple of decades ago, starting out by learning how to make dishes like Bolognese or risotto the correct way. As his confidence and skills grew over time, he became the one in his friend group who was called upon to do the cooking; it made sense, then, that when he, Manns and Olson put on dinner parties, Metz was the one in the
DECEMBER 15-21, 2021
riverfronttimes.com
Lobster pot pie with peas, tarragon, cream sherry and puff pastry. | MABEL SUEN kitchen. Over time, the three started talking about turning those justfor-fun dinners into a restaurant of their own. They had the background for it; Manns has extensive upscale-dining front-of-house experience, Olson has a degree in hospitality and restaurant management, and Metz, too, has a significant restaurant resume, including Pickles Deli in the Central West End and downtown,
which he and Olson have owned for the past fifteen years. As their discussions turned serious, the three began looking for locations and stumbled upon the former Olive Street Cafe in Creve Coeur. Curious as to why the area lacked more independent restaurants, the three signed a lease and got to work transforming the once-casual cafe into the elegant bastion of fine dining they knew it could become.
