ELIZABETH PEARCE is a cook, writer, speaker, guide, teacher, and Culinary Historian at the Hermann-Grima House in the French Quarter.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend Lee and I took a trip to St. Louis. While I loved the beautiful Beaux Arts architecture, the lush Botanical Garden, and seeing the Cardinals win, the highlight of my trip was the two nights I spent in the dim light of the bar, Sanctuaria, chatting and drinking with two guys who really love what they do for a living: Matt Seiter and Joel Clark.

It was Thursday night, our first real night in town, and Lee and I had put away a hefty pasta meal on The Hill, St. Louis’ oldest Italian neighborhood. Though stuffed and a bit sleepy from our carb overload, we decided to get an after dinner drink. I’d read that Sanctuaria had a spectacular cocktail list, so we headed over with the plan to sit in their courtyard and “have just one drink.” We never made it past the bar.

Joel Clark is my favorite kind of bartender because if you ask him a question about anything to do with drinking, the next thing you know, you are getting the whole story of that ingredient: where it comes from, how it’s made, how it functions in a drink, followed by “Here, go ahead and try my homemade orgeat/falernum/bitters.” He told me Sanctuaria is a place staffed by “passionate geeks,” an apt description of the kind of guy who can spend 20 minutes elucidating the merits of using Pommeau de Normandie in lieu of Calvados in a cocktail. But for all his knowledge, Clark isn’t stuffy at all. Unlike many high end “mixologists,” Clark eschews the bow tie and sleeve garter for a T-shirt and jeans. He arrived in St. Louis in 2005, “a green farm boy,” from Illinois, and worked his way up in the city’s bar world until late 2009 when Matt Seiter called him to offer him a . . .

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