A hot chicken joint backed by Drake is set to land in St. Louis. LA-based Dave's Hot Chicken will bring seven locations in the area, with the first opening up sometime this year. The fast-casual restaurants specialize in sliders and tenders, with a variety of firey spice levels that end in "Reaper."
This week St. Louis sees a stop from the legendary NYC experimental rock act Swans, who will bring an apocalyptic cacophony of hypnotically delivered nihilism and complex soundscapes to Delmar Hall on Friday. Elsewhere, Atlanta's Mariah the Scientist comes through to the Pageant on Tuesday, fresh off last week's arrest in which she is accused of attacking a woman at a nightclub. (Gonna need that show money for lawyer fees, lest she end up joining her boyfriend Young Thug in the clink.)
There is a clear undertone of tension on the campus of Washington University as students finish finals and prepare for commencement, Sylvie Raymond, a senior who is graduating this coming Monday, tells RFT. “I'm a little nervous to see how everything plays out and what measures the school takes,” Raymond says. “And obviously, there's always the thought in the back of my mind, like, are they going to cancel graduation?”
More than 10 years have passed since Rue Lafayette closed, but people in Lafayette Square never stopped talking about it. The cafe at 2026 Lafayette Avenue was reportedly a victim of the divorce of its proprietor Araceli Kopiloff and her husband Richard Zimmer when it shuttered in 2013, and yet no one seemed certain the closure was final, even after the divorce was. Everyone seemed to think something, surely, could be worked out, and the occasional pop-up on-site in the years that followed only kept the flame alive.
Tim Convy shows up at a Webster Groves restaurant with a heavily wrapped right thumb, a casualty of a moving accident involving a van door, but he doesn’t let it bother him. Things are going too well for him. Sure, it’s his microphone-holding hand, the one he uses during his stand-up routines as one the area’s top comics.
A little ways south of St. Louis, close to where the countryside rolls, Pedal’N Pi is fueling customers for the road. If you’re a trail biker – and, actually, if you’re not – this is the place to come. It feels like a good business model, especially when the weather is fine (and it’s a perfect day for a ride) or you happen to have a hankering for some pretty excellent sourdough pizza.
It's a primordial thing. We've been roasting our food over a flame for years. Smoke has twisted in our hair ever since we chimps came down from the trees.
A company most St. Louisans have likely never heard of — Bet Tennessee — has dissed the city’s St. Louis SC Stadium by ranking it the number one most unsafe Major League Soccer stadium in the country. Just behind St. Louis in second and third place on the list are Houston Dynamo FC and the Portland Timbers. The sports betting website claims it factored in “the crime rating, total crime index, fanbase ranking, and crime grade,” for the exact zip code of each stadium.
A progressive advocacy organization launched a new initiative today that aims to “reclaim” the concept of freedom by calling out the hypocritical politicians who use the word — and then vote its opposite. Progress Missouri says its “Missouri Freedom Project” is an effort to chronicle the actions of politicians whose votes and actions stand in opposition to their speeches. “We’re trying to reclaim the word freedom from people who don’t seem to know the meaning,” says Liz McCune, executive director of Progress Missouri.
Thursday 05/09 Too Good to Be True
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands (or should that even be millions?) of theater lovers who thrilled to the glorious falsettos in Jersey Boys, the showstopping Broadway musical that's barnstormed the nation more or less continuously since its 2005 debut, you really need to catch John Lloyd Young: Broadway's Jersey Boy at the Blue Strawberry (364 North Boyle Avenue).
On the border of the Fairground and Hyde Park neighborhoods, a mammoth has lain dormant for 20 years. Since its closure in 2004, the three-story, 51,380-square- foot Eliot School has not seen much life — but for the occasional wind or graffitist. Opposite North Grand from the schoolhouse, Jubilee Community Church works tirelessly to bring community members back to life.
A group of neighbors are threatening legal action against the out-of-state owners of the old St. Alexius hospital campus in south St. Louis if the problems plaguing the property aren’t taken care of in 60 days. The letter from the neighbors accuses property owners Jeffrey Ahlholm and Lawrence Feigen of “willfully and maliciously” abandoning the buildings of the Jefferson campus of the shuttered hospital near Cherokee Street and Jefferson Avenue. The letter says the two men left a significant amount of valuable machinery and medical equipment on the premises, turning the eleven buildings into a haven for squatters and burglars.
This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund Ta’janette Sconyers, a psychologist hired to work with youth at the St. Louis Juvenile Detention Center, found herself grappling with her own anxiety and despair over conditions inside the facility. It got so bad that she took a leave to protect her mental health.
What doesn’t kill you tastes amazing — and may still be dangerous. St. Louis Bread Co., better known as Panera to the rest of the world, announced that the chain will phase out its controversial (but again, delicious) charged lemonade following two highly publicized deaths of people who’d consumed the beverage. College students facing finals (and exhausted journalists everywhere) can still buy the drink, but not for long.
Student organizers are urging actress Jennifer Coolidge to skip Washington University’s commencement ceremony in protest of how the university responded to Pro-Palestine protests on campus. Coolidge was selected by the university to be the keynote speaker at graduation on Monday. Now, activists with Resist Wash U and the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee have published a video montage on social media pleading with her to boycott the ceremony.
A second person is now facing charges stemming from a burglary spree that occurred over two nights in April involving smash and grabs at 11 south St. Louis businesses. Glenn Ray, 21, was hit with 31 felony and misdemeanor charges on Friday. His alleged co-conspirator in the burglaries, Leslie James, 18, was charged two weeks ago, done in by the fact that he allegedly committed the crimes while wearing an ankle monitor.
One week after the RFT broke news about infighting within the nine-person group tasked with re-imagining the charter for the City of St. Louis, the chairwoman of the group was removed from her position after a vote of no confidence by the other members. Last week, the RFT reported that five members of the Charter Commission had sent Chairwoman Jazzmine Nolan-Echols an email calling on her to apologize for comments she made during an April meeting to Christine Ingrassia, director of operations for the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and a non-voting member of the Charter Commission. At yesterday's meeting, the chair’s removal was begun by commission member Travis Sheridan, who initially called on Nolan-Echols to resign.
Randy Heisner and Chuck Powers, who hope to open a new bar on South Kingshighway in a few months, have the perfect origin story for two would-be saloon keepers: For 20 years, they hung out together at the bar that used to be located on site. For pretty much their entire friendship, the bar was Cotter's Sports Bar, a low-key St. Louis neighborhood spot at 4610 South Kingshighway in Bevo Mill. As Heisner tells it, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the bar's longtime owner sold it, but the new owner wasn't able to make it work.
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