Hook Fish Chicken & Grill

The other day, I was on my way to grab some Chinese and I spotted this place.
I’m a big fan of these restaurants where everything is deep fried and it all kinda tastes the same, i.e. delicious. Certain parts of St. Louis are lousy with them. I drive past three to five of them on the way home from my job in a diverse, vibrant community.
This one is closest to where I live, so if the food wasn’t completely terrible that would be perfect for me, I figured.
I’m always on the lookout for places that sell a tripe sandwich. I grew up on tripe sandwiches from Lewis Snack Shop on Delmar, right on the dividing line between the part of the city that eats tripe sandwiches and the part of the city that eats brain sandwiches. It’s why I turned out so well.
The legendary Miami Grill, maybe a mile down the road, doesn’t carry them. A few times now, I’ve seen people come in there looking for them only to leave disappointed.
This place, meanwhile, has a sign on the front window advertising a tripe sandwich special. Oddly enough, the sign seems purposely designed to match the signs on the Korean beauty supply place next door. I didn’t see any Koreans up front or in the back. Like Bossip, I’m thinking this place is owned by Arabs.
Sidebar: This used to be a hardware store. Back during the crack era, it was patrolled by a dog roughly the size of a grizzly bear. It wouldn’t bother you, but if you so much as thought about stealing I’m sure it would quite literally tear you to pieces. You’d never be heard from again, packed in a sealed oil drum in the basement.
So i went with the tripe sandwich. For $ 5.99 it comes with fries and a can of soda. They’re very adamant about ordering you to select a kind of soda that comes in a can, from a seemingly endless selection of bizarre, artificial flavors (like at a Chinese restaurant) and also Pepsi and Diet Pepsi. The kind that comes in a bottle must be prohibitively expensive.
A tripe sandwich is more or less the same concept as a St. Paul, except instead of egg foo young it’s a cow’s stomach. (My bad if you’re not from the STL and hence have no idea what I’m talking about.) It’s deep fried (natch) and served on white bread with mustard, pickles and raw onions, and it comes with hot sauce you can put on it if you want to. I find the latter unnecessary, but I also find that nothing was ever ruined by hot sauce.
You can order it soft, medium or hard. Hard means they deep fry it to within an inch of its life, like the wings at the aforementioned Miami Grill. Medium still has a bit of chew to it, which is the whole point of eating a tripe sandwich. I’d even consider ordering it soft, but my fear is that they’d give you something that’s still raw on the inside, like at the ‘80s-​era London and Sons.
The bread on my sandwich seemed like it may have been sitting out for a minute, or maybe it was lightly toasted. Whatever was going on there, I could have done without it. Sandwiches on white bread, especially when there’s mustard on them, tend to turn into goo and stick to the roof of your mouth, but as far as I’m concerned that’s part of the experience.
The meat, on the other hand, was perfect (nullus), perhaps needless to say, being deep fried and all. It was nice and crispy on the outside, but soft and chewy on the inside, like some ungodly and yet delicious meat bubblegum. If there’s a problem with it, it’s that you wish it was little bit bigger. It’s not the most expensive thing in the world, but I’m not about to order two, because I don’t need two orders of fries and two cans of soda.
I can easily drink two cans of soda, but what if I want to have beer with my dinner? This place is right next to the rare convenience store in the county where you can cop a 40. If only they did some sort of cross-​promotion with Hook: tripe sandwich, fries and a 40. I’d be willing to spend as much as $ 8.