Harvest
Steve Gontram was born and raised in St. Louis.
After graduating Country Day High School in 1987, he studied for the
foreign service at Georgetown University. However, experiencing fine dining around the world motivated Gontram to
change career paths. He enrolled in
the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and it was here
that he
met Matthew Bousquet, a native of northern California.
While in school, Gontram and Bousquet formed a business that catered food and wine pairings for a winery in Livermore, California. After graduating, they worked at San Francisco's top restaurants – One Market, Postrio, Chez Panisse and The Mandarin Oriental. But the two chefs were coaxed to leave California for Missouri by Gontram's father. They returned to St. Louis and formed a partnership with three restaurateurs – Bob Gontram, Charlie Downs and George Mahe. In December of 1996, the group opened a restaurant at 1059 South Big Bend Boulevard, in the north end of a one-story building; Hank’s Cheesecakes occupied the south end. They called their new restaurant Harvest.
The space had recently been occupied by Cyrano's, but only a functioning fireplace recalled the departed
European-style coffeehouse.
Harvest's large dining room had high-beamed ceilings
and walls painted warm yellow ocher; accent walls in eggplant adding
contrast. In later years, the walls were toned down to a
laurel green.
To the east of the main dining room, through
three archways, was a smaller patio-like room. Initially, banners of
purple, red, blue and yellow floated from its ceiling over wicker chairs and tables.
The room took on a more
formal look when its walls turned laurel green.
The five partners all participated in the operation of the restaurant. Gontram and Bousquet worked in the kitchen, Bob Gontram oversaw reservations and accounting, George Mahe was the general manager and maître d’, and Charlie Downs made sure the building and restaurant were in working order. Harvest's menu was billed as "rustic American food." Gontram described it as "fresh, unpretentious food. We use seasonal produce at the peak of its flavor, so we can rely on that flavor, with only salt and pepper. No masking is necessary."
The menu at Harvest reflected those
philosophies. Lamb, halibut, duck, salmon, lobster, risotto, pasta,
pork, chicken and soft-shelled crab were served with the produce of
the season: sweet corn succotash, farm greens, mango salsa, sweet
pepper curry sauce, house-made applesauce, apple and wild mushroom
crisp, Chinese long beans, daikon radish salad, cilantro chilies,
avocados, shallots, rhubarb, asparagus and red onions.
Harvest was the first restaurant in town to layer an entree’s various components, artfully shingling and stacking the dish’s proteins and sides. The plating was one of the restaurant’s claims to fame. Harvest was the first local restaurant to serve halved heads of grilled romaine lettuce; the first to instruct diners that some fish tasted better if undercooked; the first to make homemade ketchup – and then switch to Heinz because its customers never warmed up to the homemade stuff.
And Harvest was the first to entice thousands
of guests to partake of a dessert they’d avoided for years – bread
pudding – a Steve Gontram recipe that originated in New Orleans and
got tweaked in San Francisco. Harvest's
Brioche Bread Pudding
became one of the city's more iconic desserts.
By early 1999, Mathew Bousquet had left Harvest
to work at The Grill at the Ritz-Carlton. He would eventually move
on to Colorado and then back to California. An impressive list of
chefs would join Gontram in Harvest's kitchen, including Nick
Miller, Kevin Nashan, Brian Hardesty, Andrew White, Brian Doherty,
Brendan Noonan, Josh Charles and Josh Poletti.
By 2001, Steve Gontram was Harvest's sole owner, in addition to its executive chef. He changed his menu four times a year. "Menus are like kids," he said. "They either take off running or they fall flat." Early in 2007, Gontram put aside the butter, cream and cooking oils in his kitchen and developed a "Wellness Spa Menu." Those high-fat ingredients still had a place on much of Harvest’s menu, but on the spa portion of the menu, a rotating selection of appetizers and entrees was prepared without fat. "It’s easy to throw in a pat of butter or a dap of cream into a regular dish," Gontram instructed. "Instead, we use a variety of other ingredients. You have to be a lot more creative. We use lots of purees, for example, and fresh herbs, along with spices and marinades. The only fat we use is the fat that occurs naturally in the protein itself."
Harvest's Summer 2007 Wellness
Spa Menu was indeed creative, including
North Atlantic
Lemon Sole Served "en Papillote"
and
Jerked Paillard of Young Tom Turkey Breast.
On September 7, 2010, a few months short of his restaurant's 14th anniversary and two days after his 41st birthday, Steve Gontram worked at Harvest for the last time. Nick Miller, Gontram's executive chef, had purchased the restaurant.
Gontram explained, "This is a young man's game,
and I'm just not feeling young anymore. It's a great business, but
it's a grueling physical business. And there's just no personal life
here.
"I think the beginning of the end for me — when
I started to ask whether I should sell — was when I felt like I was
spending too much time away from the kitchen. When our last general
manager left a few years ago, Andy White was in the kitchen and
really had everything under control, so it was natural for me to
start spending a lot more time in the dining room. I think it was a
necessary move, but one that led me to think about doing other
things. The kitchen has always been where my heart is."
Nick Miller was Harvest's owner/chef for almost four more years. Then, after the dinner service on Sunday, June 15, 2014, Harvest closed its doors for good. "The overriding issue is the sheer number of dining choices in St. Louis right now," Miller explained. "And there are so many new places for people to check out that the old standbys get forgotten. 'Let’s go back to Harvest' was something we would have liked to have heard more."
The other problem was cash flow. "When cash
flow gets tight, something has to give," Miller elaborated. "Most
times, it’s the quality of product that gets cut and I just couldn’t
do that. It was not my style, and I was not willing to take Harvest
there."
After closing Harvest, Nick Miller joined forces with Bissinger's to run the company's then-new event space, the Caramel Room, at its production facility on North Broadway. In 2012, Steve Gontram founded 5 Star Burgers, a gourmet hamburger joint, currently with locations in Clayton and Creve Coeur.
And what became of the storied space next to
Hank's Cheesecakes at 1059 South Big Bend Boulevard? Riverbend
Restaurant moved in, but found Cyrano's and Harvest hard acts to
follow, lasting only a few years. By January of 2018, another
restaurant occupied the space. It had a storied past of its own.
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