Isn’t dinner a destination in itself? Isn’t a great meal—plumped up with good service and a pleasant atmosphere—enough? The food and beverage industry has a long history of not leaving well enough alone. Duds ’n Suds (the laundromat that sells beer) exemplifies just how innovative one can get with a liquor license.
An even more outrageous—if entirely informal—pairing is grocery store and dating service. Long before eHarmony and match.com, the supermarket at Big Bend and Clayton was affectionately known among singles as Disco Schnucks because Friday and Saturday nights found the produce department stocked with well-dressed singles taking a very long time choosing lettuce. (The action has since moved to Whole Foods.)
Mostly, however, if another commercial venture is piggybacked onto dinner and drinks, it’s that of entertainment. Live music is the most common of these, dinner theater is the worst, and—if you have small children—Chuck E. Cheese’s is the most useful.
Last year, the Moolah Temple introduced St. Louis to the concept of a high-end bar coupled with a bowling alley and luxe movie theater.
This spring, two more restaurant combinations took hold: Finale Music & Dining in Clayton and the Central West End’s Savor, a restaurant that also houses the Flim Flam (magic) Theater.
Of the two, Savor seems a more organic and earnest approach, if a longer shot. The handsome young Jonathan Schoen dreamed of opening a restaurant. His father, Dennis, owns a general contracting firm with Nathalie Pettus but has had a lifelong appreciation for the practice of magic, including a year with his own stage show in a traveling circus. A former incarnation of Flim Flam was located on Delmar in the 1990s. Contracting, Dennis laughs, “was just on the side.”
The senior Schoen thought to bring his and his son’s ideas under one roof. He bought and rehabbed the two-story turn-of-the-century building at 4356 Lindell. His son designed a world cuisine restaurant, hiring one of the city’s best talents, Kirk Warner, formerly executive chef of King Louie’s.
“Clearly,” says Warner, “people see dinner theater and think of bad Continental-American food. So I think it’s a real challenge for us to take it to a different level.”
And take it to another level they have, with a sophisticated menu that includes entrées of lacquered duck ($23) and Goan-style seafood curry ($19) as well as a mesclun salad with warm goat cheese and red grapes ($8).
“I don’t know much about the theater aspect of it,” admits Warner. “I just know that it’s not going to affect the type of kitchen I run.”
Warner once worked at an Ann Arbor, Mich., restaurant with a basement comedy club. “It was one of the best kitchens I’ve ever worked in,” he says. “They made everything from scratch, the food was very good and it was packed all the time.” In short, he says, “I’ve seen it work.”
In Clayton, three experienced entrepreneurs have calculated that it will work. In Bob Saur’s Clayton on the Park Hotel, restaurateur Ted Geiger and entertainment producer Steve Schankman have created Finale. Geiger and Schankman, alone or in other partnerships, have been involved in the successes of Riverport (now UMB Bank Pavilion), The Pageant, J. Buck’s, Fuzio and Chevy’s.
“I’m like everybody else,” says Schankman, “a married guy, you go out on a Friday night, you have your dinner wherever.” And then, he laments, it’s, “Where we goin’ now?” Schankman wanted to create a jazz club that also offered convenience.
For those who aren’t after a one-stop evening, dining rooms at both Savor and Finale are decidedly apart from theater spaces. In other words, these guys have thought of everything. This leaves future entrepreneurial foodies in St. Louis with just one uncharted horizon: Figuring out how to institute a cover charge near Aisle Three.
