By Christy Marshall
The days of KMOX and the old Mike Shannon’s Steaks & Seafood are gone. Now the player turned play-by-play-er airs from a new station and holds court on Fridays after home games at his new designer digs—same street (Market), same block (Seventh) but on the other side of Kiener Plaza. Drawn by the powerful lures of the brand new Busch Stadium, the future Ballpark Village and the fact that Shannon’s son-in-law Kevin McGowan bought the building, Shannon’s moved and grew—like Shaquille O’Neal at 14. The original sat 227 plus the (small) bar. The new one maxes out at 1,544, which includes The Outfield (1,000 but only open on game days and for private parties), the main dining room (165) and the bar/lounge (115).
Pat Shannon, one of the six Shannon children, runs the restaurant with her parents. She wanted architect Greg Trost of the Lawrence Group and designer Lori Olsen, then with the Lawrence Group and now with Space Interiors, to keep the personality of the original Shannon’s but make it “updated, urban and wow,” Pat says. “They did.”
The layout of the original building design was easily converted. “It was the old Mark Twain bank,” Trost says, “and it turned out great as a restaurant—the floor-to-ceiling glass windows; the old teller lane, now the beer garden; and the vault, now the wine cellar.”
And then, of course, there was that memorabilia mandate.
“You don’t want to make it baseball Disneyland,” Olsen says. But, there are the 557 framed pieces of sports mementos. There is the Tower of Baseballs, a floor-to-ceiling sculpture of 452 autographed hardballs. The granite fireplace is flanked by cases holding signed bats. Original pictures of everyone from Babe Ruth to, well, Mike Shannon, hang on soffits and whatever available wall space could be reasonably used. And, for those of you unable to get tickets to the game, nearly two dozen TVs are spread throughout, including a 50-inch plasma in the Stan Musial Room downstairs.
Shannon’s signature dark green colors some walls, but navy appears elsewhere; banquettes are upholstered in leather in baseball glove shades. Fabrics heavy on Irish heritage were used, like the houndstooth check on the dining room chairs. The wood is dark pub mahogany.
There are also the power corner tables, for eight, with curtains composed of gold beads that, at least psychologically, separate them from the rest of the dining room.
Then there are the snugs—two private dining hideaways, each holding four max and hidden behind doors with small leaded glass portholes on the side walls. They’re perfect for planning a Sopranos-style hit or scoring a home run of a different sort. “And that,” Pat says, laughing, “is why we put the windows in.”
620 Market, 314-421-1540, www.shannonsteak.com. (Reservations may be made online.)
