Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Matt and Amy Herren
Matt and Amy Herren
For the past two decades, Amy and Matt Herren have been helping shape the Metro East into the vibrant culinary scene that it is today—at first, individually through their respective businesses, Fond and Goshen Coffee, and now through their collective efforts at Wood River’s C&B Boiled Bagels and 1929 Pizza & Wine. At the latter, a rehabbed historic building they describe as “the worst building in all of Wood River,” before they got their hands on it, the husband-and-wife team are serving wood-fired food, wine, and some of Amy’s greatest hits from Fond at a reservations-only chef’s table. At the same time, they are helping spearhead a Wood River renaissance, similar to what they achieved in downtown Edwardsville in the early 2000s.
Seriously, the two of you were archenemies when you first met?
Matt: We hated each other. I would drive by her store, and she would flip me off. We shared customers, and they wouldn’t tell us that they patronized the other’s business.
Amy: We also had employees who worked for the both of us, but they wouldn’t tell us that they worked for the other. They breathed a sigh of relief when we made up.
How could you go from that to getting married?
Matt: There was a big storm, and Amy lost power at her restaurant and store. And that’s the way the restaurant industry works—even though you hate someone, you help them when they need it, because that’s just what you do. I took a generator down to her store, stood outside her walk-in, and we exchanged profanities as her parents looked in horror. Then I asked her on a date, and she told me what I could do with myself. Fast-forward six weeks later; we had a chance meeting and had some drinks. I was headed to Philadelphia, and when I was there, I sent her a text with a picture of her favorite beer that you could only get on the East Coast and told her I would bring her some back.
Amy: I don’t want to make it sound like I could be bought with a couple of cases of beer, but…
Matt: Then we decided to get married. Nobody believed it.
Amy: I think it worked out because no one else could stand either one of us.
How did you both end up in Edwardsville?
Amy: I was born and raised in Edwardsville, went to college at the University of Illinois, and while I was there, I fell into working in bars and restaurants and booking bands, which led to wanting to be in restaurants all the time. I went to the CIA [Culinary Institute of America] right after graduation in 1998, finished there, and stayed in New York for the next eight years, working my way around the city at some really great places. I felt like I had gotten another foundation of education working for those places and was ready to move back. It just felt like the time was right for me to open Fond. Maybe it was a little too adventurous and wasn’t the best choice of time or place; it didn’t help that the market crashed in 2008. But I did what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. I don't make any apologies for that.
Matt: I grew up in San Francisco, followed the [Grateful] Dead for a bunch of years, and ended up owning a coffee shop in Humboldt County, California, for a brief time, but I quickly realized that what I wanted to do is control production. Buying roasted coffee was satisfying, but it didn’t allow me to have control over how the coffee was presented. I moved to Seattle to focus on roasting coffee and spent about five years there. My ex-wife is from Edwardsville, and I did research on where would be the best spot geographically to open an organic, fair-trade coffee company. At the time, the St. Louis market was just Howard [Lerner] and Suzanne [Langlois] at Kaldi’s and a couple of big bulk companies. There was no real renaissance of coffee roasting, so I moved here, started roasting in April 2000, started Goshen Coffee, and built up and up. Then I built a wood-fired brick oven in Edwardsville and started selling naturally leavened bread at farmers’ markets. It was doing so well that I went out, borrowed $440,000, and opened 222 Artisan Bakery in 2003.
Fond closed in 2011. You got married in 2012. What did you do after that?
Amy: I bounced around a little bit, but my other business, Township Grocer, kept going for a few years.
Matt: And then we traveled for 10 years, both nationally and internationally. Our goal was to move to Australia, and we started a company there that sold manufacturing products to businesses in the U.S. Then the pandemic happened, and we got stuck in the U.S.
And eventually you found yourself back in Edwardsville and in search of good bagels and pizza.
Amy: We’d been coming here a lot, back and forth, because my dad is sick, so we decided we needed a space of our own here. We bought 5 acres in the country and were trying to figure out what we were going to do and how we were going to build a house and such.
Matt: Really, the only complaints we had were that you couldn’t get bagels in this area, and there was no decent pizza.
Amy: So one day, we randomly decided to drive down to Wood River. We figured it’s basically bombed out, so maybe we could do something.
How did you get sold on the idea of opening a business there?
Amy: We saw a space that was absolutely terrible and called the number. It was to the chief of police, Brad Wells, who ended up showing us the building. He told us, “I get this won’t work for you, but will you come to my office and spend some time with me and have a conversation?” He also invited the mayor; we sat there for three hours, and he took us building by building, piece by piece, on maps explaining his vision on how to turn the town around. He’d been retired but agreed to come back on as chief of police under the condition that he’d be able to be in charge of building and zoning as well. He just had this attitude that said, “We are going to own our scars and get better.”
And those conversations resulted in C&B Boiled Bagels and 1929 Pizza & Wine. What is your vision for each of those?
Matt: When C&B is at its peak, we will have 40 full-time employees and will do 10,000 bagels per day. It was just not enough for us to have a quaint café that sells bagels. This is more about giving St. Louis what it deserves, which is a regional brand that St. Louis can be proud of.
And then there’s the pizza. What inspires 1929?
Matt: We want to offer approachable pizza that is not going to scare anybody off. What we do here is very elevated; we only have eight pizzas on the menu, and everything is hand done—from the dough to the sausage to the mozzarella. We swing for the fences with all eight, and we offer no substitutions or build-your-own. Amy is also doing a full five- to eight-course tasting menu with wine pairings, and most of the people booking that are people who ate at Fond and want that experience again.
This all sounds like a gamble, but it’s bigger than just pizza and bagels, isn’t it?
Matt: We see flaws within our industry and recognize things we’d like to see changed. Both 1929 and C&B are living-wage-accredited companies, and we tip share. People are literally making a living wage here, which is unheard of in this industry. We made a splash in Wood River, where our starting wage is more than $16 per hour. Some other restaurants were less than impressed that we would offer that, but if you invest in people, they will provide you with the level of service you want. We live by pride before profits. You can’t be afraid to lose a little bit of money in the beginning and struggle a bit. Otherwise, you just care about profits.
