The scene at the Shangri-La Diner on Cherokee Street a week ago was like one of those cathartic New Orleans jazz funerals, where mourning meshes with the bittersweet joy of existence itself, and people smile and cry at the same time. The Shangri-La -- with its wild interior of sherbet colors and bead curtains, its charismatic staff, its veggie burger nonpareil -- was in its death throes.
Patrice Mari, owner, den mother, vegetarian, lover of life, force of nature, was sitting down at the tables with her friends -- and everyone who ever ate at the Shangri-La is Patrice’s friend – having intimate conversations about the future, punctuated by hugs, before she had to run back in the kitchen and make sure nobody’s dinner was burning.
“People were saying, ‘You can’t leave! This is a community!’” recalls Mari. “They were crying, and I was crying, too.”
St. Louis’ vegetarians have been congregating around Mari and her excellent veggie burgers, veggie meatloaf, veggie Reubens, veggie gyros, crème brulee French toast, tofu slingers, “Hostess with the Mostess” dessert cupcakes, and so on for six years now.
Her Sunday brunch, too, will be sorely missed by her “community of like-minded, kindred spirits,” she says. “Someone even wanted to get married here on my last Sunday of business.”
Why is Mari closing the Shangri-La? She says she has decided to devote her time to developing vegetarian dishes that would be carried by grocery stores under her own imprint, “Shangri Life.”
She acknowledges another reason, so painful for us foodies to hear, but so true – our food heroes, the restaurateurs, often lead lives so hectic they risk job burnout. “I’m burned out on the restaurant business,” says Mari. “It’s a killer business, especially if you start with zero investment capital.”
“I haven’t been outside of Missouri in seven years,” she adds, and what’s more, the Shangri-La has actually become too popular for its own kitchen.
“We’ve outgrown our kitchen, we can’t get food out fast enough,” she says. “People have no idea how crazy it is in there. It’s like, ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,’ ya know?”
Mari isn’t completely shuttering the joint – she says she plans to run her veggie-burger bar, featuring sliders with a buffet of sautéed portabella mushrooms, her delicious baked black beans, fries, cole slaw, etc. at $10 for all you can eat, every Wednesday from 7 to 9 p.m., starting soon.
She also would like to use her space “as a banquet center for my favorite animal-welfare groups,” she says, and to occasionally host “allergen free” dinners with “no corn, nuts, wheat, gluten, or soy.”
Her decision to move on, she says, could not have involved leaving the magical Shangri-La space, as much a gathering ground for a tribe of grinning friends as it is an eatery.
“I cannot tear this place down,” she says. “It’s beautiful, whimsical, unpretentious, and special.”
As Mari says on the Shangri-La’s web page, “We're that friend you had in high school that would stand up in civics class and yell about oppression, we're that crazy but cool aunt with all of those giant feathered hats, we're Uncle Wilber who moved to San Francisco for some culture, we're that guy up the street that wears nothing but tie-dye T-shirts and keeps his hair in a ponytail. We're weird, we're fun, we're fabulous...”
And, we would add, delicious, and encouraged to stick around in any form for as long as the fates permit.
Interior photo courtesy of Julie Shafferkoetter.
