Post-Dispatch file photo
Billie-Jean
When restaurateur Zoë Robinson and chef Ny Vongsaly began planning the menu for their latest collaboration, Robinson told me in an interview last year, the ideas “just started pouring out of us, like writing.” This graceful confidence suffuses Billie-Jean, from the bold, sexy, black-on-black design to Vongsaly’s cooking, a seamless and deeply personal synthesis of the foodways of his native Laos and Southeast Asia and his long partnership with Robinson (the late Cafe Zoë and Zoë Pan-Asian Cafe and the still thriving I Fratellini and Bar Les Frères). At Billie-Jean, Vongsaly invigorates tired tropes (hamachi crudo and beef carpaccio) and builds bottomless layers of flavor (sesame-lacquered Japanese eggplant with tofu, a shrimp-pork dumpling soup brightened with makrut lime and lemon grass). “You should always be growing and always be pushing,” Robinson told me last year. At Billie-Jean, she and Vongsaly have pushed themselves into the highest rank of St. Louis restaurants.
Hours: Dinner Tuesday-Saturday
Last year's ranking: New this year
Opened: 2017