Kevin McKernan owns a half-dozen of the kind of classic neighborhood businesses that feel increasingly endangered. He and his wife Erin own Donut Drive-In, the unpretentious shop in Lindenwood Park. They own Epiphany Lanes, a low-key bowling alley once run by the Catholic parish that still shares its parking lot. He founded The Improv Shop and they now own Cafe Manhattan and Blackthorn Pub, too.
Beyond the nostalgic factor, these businesses seemingly have little in common. But that’s not how McKernan thinks about it. “It’s like real human connection in these unique places where people have to deal with each other, or watch each other, and hopefully the result is smiling or happiness or like, ‘Oh, this is fun,’” he explains in a new episode of The 314 Podcast. Think of them as a welcome dose of local flavor in a world that seems increasingly intent on retreating into the generic.
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A teacher who still works part-time at Saint Louis University High School, McKernan grew up in St. Louis Hills. He left St. Louis for college at Indiana University and then tried his hand at improv comedy in Chicago. It was only after he moved back to his hometown that he found himself bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. But it was never about wanting to run a business; it was simply about wanting to do improv.
“There was no one doing what I wanted to do,” he says. “If there was a theater that already existed, I would’ve just joined it. But it didn’t exist, so I had to start it.” He adds, “To me, all this stuff is just problem/solution. So the problem is, no improv theater. Then the solution is, build an improv theater. And that brings up a bunch of new problems and then you just keep solving the one next little problem.” The next thing you know, you own not just an improv theater but two doughnut shops (Donut Drive-In now has a sister shop in Brentwood, Donut Drive-Up), a bowling alley, a pizza parlor, a cafe, and a recording studio (Gaslight Studio & Lounge, the one business that is not currently open to the public, though McKernan is noodling with some ideas). Somehow, he makes it look easy.
To that end, he credits his wife Erin, who he knew growing up in St. Louis Hills. (Both were students at St. Gabe’s, where, he says, “It was like a John Hughes movie. I was Anthony Michael Hall and she was whoever”—basically, the character who did not want to date Anthony Michael Hall.) Today, he’s the guy with a million ideas; she’s the skilled manager who keeps things running smoothly. “She loves Excel. I barely know what it does,” he says. Now they’re raising their 8-year-old son in the same neighborhood where they grew up, an almost shockingly Leave It to Beaver existence where both sets of grandparents live right down the street.
As they run their growing empire, the McKernans have figured out a few things—chiefly, to hire good people to manage the day to day. And by thinking of challenges as problems to be solved, he’s been able to bring businesses seemingly frozen in amber into the 21st century without upsetting their loyal customers. As an example, he points to the pizza sauce at Blackthorn Pub, which they acquired in 2024. “People were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so spicy.’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, but that’s the thing that makes it special.’ All we did was add an option. Now you can do non-spicy.”
As another example, you can now order your doughnuts online. But despite that technological innovation, a visit still feels much the same as it did 40 years ago. “We don’t put Captain Crunch on the doughnuts,” McKernan says. ”Everything else is the same. And if you want to have the experience of just walking in like it’s 1953, you can.”
It’s not the way you wring profits out of the business, and that’s OK with McKernan. He has different motivations. He says, “My wife and I joke that I died when I was 13 and now I’m living in a simulation of, like, a 13-year-old boy’s dream. I just feel like a child that’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a bowling alley. I’ve got a place to have a beer with my friends, I’ve got this girl that I like.’ If you do think about what was compelling to me at 13 years old, what was awesome about St. Louis and living in the city, I just get to live in that world now.”
