St. Louis is about to get a lot more caffeinated. Today, local specialty roaster Blueprint Coffee opens a new headquarters and roastery in the Tiffany neighborhood just north of Shaw. The new facility at 1600 South 39th Street is large — 11,000 square foot.
The race for St. Louis city sheriff has narrowed into a two-person affair, with Anthony Anderson dropping out of the race and throwing his weight behind Alfred Montgomery, the former deputy challenging incumbent Vernon Betts. “Let St. Louis know, I’m supporting the young guy,” Anderson said in a phone call yesterday with the RFT. A retired St. Louis Metropolitan Police officer who currently works as a detective for the North County Police Cooperative, Anderson says he’s dropping out as his mother and his father-in-law are battling health issues, and he needs to concentrate on them rather than a campaign.
Landmark south city bar and grill the Haven (6625 Morgan Ford Road) has closed its doors, possibly temporarily, following the death of owner John Gasperi early last month. The restaurant announced Gasperi's April 9 passing on its various social media platforms, writing on Google that "John loved the Haven, and its employees, and customers more than anything. As many of you know John struggled with various health problems the past few years, he was a fighter, and a friend to everyone.
Sugar Shack Cafe (1416 East 20th Street, Granite City, Illinois) has opened in the former home of Petri Cafe. The 1950s-vibe diner, owned by Trecie Wilson and Steven Perkins, served its first breakfast April 1. The couple most recently ran their Madison, Illinois, location of Sugar Shack as takeout only, but now they have closed that location and jumped into a full-service, sit-down restaurant dishing up the kind of comfort food that is close to their hearts.
It has taken nearly two years, but the residents of a small corner of the city's Forest Park Southeast neighborhood are again able to get permits for parking — and if that doesn't sound like cause for celebration, perhaps you have not lived in St. Louis long enough. The saga began in the spring of 2022, when the nonprofit Park Central Development relinquished administration of the parking permit program to the treasurer's office for the City of St. Louis. The timeline of when Park Central notified the city it wanted help with the program is a matter of some dispute, but what's clear is that when permits for the 10 districts in Forest Park Southeast and the Central West End came up for renewal that June, no one was fully prepared to process them.
It's going to be a busy Friday at the Saint Louis Art Museum (One Fine Arts Drive, slam.org) as the museum opens two exhibits that draw on its permanent collection. Both Romare Bearden: Resonances and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will make their debuts. Romare Bearden: Resonances is centered around Summertime, a piece from SLAM's permanent collection that exemplifies the collage technique the modernist artist is known for.
Two bills introduced with the St. Louis Board of Aldermen aim to ensure that attorneys can visit their clients in jail and allow city officials to visit the jail without prior notice. As controversy after controversy roils the St. Louis City Justice Center, jail administrators have responded by blocking attorney access and barring them from bringing cellphones with them to visit clients. The bills seek to mitigate that.
A total of 140 Washington University School of Law faculty, students and alumni have signed an open letter condemning the university for the mass arrests and suspensions that followed Saturday’s Pro-Palestine protest. The letter — addressed to Chancellor Andrew Martin and Vice Chancellors Anna Gonzalez, Nichol Luoma, Beverly Wendland and Robert Wild — says the university administration's characterization of events “does not align with many firsthand reports from the scene.” In a statement following the protest, Martin said protestors behaved “aggressively” and referred to the demonstration as a “dark sad day” for the university.
The doughnut news is good: After more than 70 years in business, South City’s Donut Drive-In is spreading the wealth. A new sister shop – Donut Drive-Up (8950 Manchester Road; Brentwood) – will open by the end of May in the former To Go Sushi space. Owner Kevin McKernan bought the original Donut Drive-In (6525 Chippewa Street) in 2020 after it went on the market in 2019.
For the first time since the City of St. Louis accused her of masterminding a massive illegal rooming house scheme, Dara Daugherty took the stand in court yesterday, telling a judge that she no longer owns one of her portfolio's most squalid holdings. Daugherty testified she recently sold the home with the Dutch gambrel roof on Virginia Avenue, a nuisance property that was the bane of its neighbors and where the city claims Daugherty housed an ad-hoc, unpaid labor force that worked on her slum empire's "fixer-upper" properties. Yesterday’s hearing came as part of the city’s ongoing civil lawsuit against Daugherty and five of her family members and associates who are accused of running an illegal rooming house scheme that spanned 39 properties across nine south city neighborhoods.
We love getting out to the green pastures of Cottleville, and now we’ll have even more incentive to do so when Cottle Village Farmstead + Distillery (6470 Highway N, Cottleville) opens later this year. By then, this 4.5-acre plot of land and its various buildings (farmhouse, shed and barn) will have been retooled to create a unique drinking and dining experience, as reported by St. Louis Magazine. Stephen Savage, of Wheelhouse, The Midwestern and Start Bar, owns Cottle Village with his wife Emily Savage.
If you were opening a bar designed to be a hub for tabletop games and nerd culture, you might decide that there could be no better day to open for business than May 4. "May the Fourth be with you" puns have been an important play on Star Wars dialogue going all the back to 1979 and the reign of British Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher (yes, really). But as it turns out, that's not why husband-and-wife team Jason Moughton and Ruth Camburn are opening their new dungeons & dragons-focused eatery, Dirty 20 Nerd Bar (14051 Manchester Road, Ballwin), on May 4.
April brought a host of restaurants to St. Louis that are sure to be new favorites. But we also saw a surge of new old favorites come to the fore — including Union Loafers' new market at the Station, Pizza Via from the founder of Pizzeoli and Pizza Head, and a new location of health-focused cafe Revel Kitchen. Then came the third life of what is arguably St. Louis' best fried chicken.
A Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor was among those arrested at Washington University Saturday during a protest calling for the university to divest from Boeing amid Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza — and his wife says he was brutally beaten. Steve Tamari, a history professor, was recording video of the students and activists circling the makeshift encampment as police began their arrests on Saturday. In a video posted by his wife, Sandra, Tamari is grabbed and wrestled to the ground by at least four officers.
Epic tales span generations, connecting historic events to contemporary perspectives and building a bridge of understanding. Such is the case with The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez. The play in two parts features gay men reconciling their lives and history — what was lost and gained — in the post AIDS-crisis era.
Five members of the St. Louis Charter Commission are calling on their chairperson to apologize for recent comments she made concerning a City Hall staffer’s involvement in a fatal car accident more than a decade ago. It is just the latest in a series of contretemps stifling the rare opportunity this body has to modernize city government. The letter was sent to Jazzmine Nolan-Echols, chair of the city’s Charter Commission, an entity established last year by voters to update the city’s century-old charter, the document that outlines how governance in the city gets done.
The ACLU of Missouri issued a harsh critique of Washington University’s handling of a Pro-Palestine protest and encampment on Saturday, saying it “chills, curtails, and restricts expression despite the university’s claims of commitment to that very principle.” A total of 100 people were arrested on campus during the protest on Saturday, April 27, including 23 Wash U students and at least four employees, according to Chancellor Andrew Martin. Six faculty members have now been banned from campus and forbidden from speaking with students and their colleagues even off campus.
Kim’s Bop Shop opened April 5 as a cloud kitchen operating out of the Hill Food Co. (2360 Hampton Avenue) in south St. Louis. It’s owned by Nicole and Sean Kim who have some interesting culinary credentials between them.
It's hard to imagine many things more lovely than strolling through the Central West End on a May day with a glass of rose in hand — which might be why the neighborhood's annual "walking wine fest" Rose All Day has sold out for the past five years. Everybody loves May weather in the Midwest, and everybody really loves rose! It's not too late, however, to get in on this year's festivities.
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