Been There? SuWaller's Bar & Grill in Overland

We figure, hey, it’s a biker joint. So we ask our editor to go there with us. “You ride,” we say. “You can wear your colors, talk biker talk, crank open a beer bottle with your ear. Stuff like that.”

“I ride a 160 cc scooter,” he says.

Motor bike’s a motor bike, in our opinion, however, and we’re seriously disappointed when he passes. We’d pay for his meal, just to watch him roar—well, “roar” more in the sense of a weed whacker roar than Harley-Davidson roar, but still—up to a nefarious biker hangout in his Easter egg-pastel hued vesture and swagger into the place.

Turns out it wouldn’t have been as much fun as we thought. The scooter would actually have fit pretty well with the Toyotas, Kias, and other such distinctly not-outlaw vehicles in the lot when we arrive at SuWaller’s Bar & Grill. If there are any biker gangs there, they’re likely members of Hell’s Autodidacts or something similar. In fact, the clientele look suspiciously less like Los Banditos and more like members of El Monsanto.

“Are we too early to watch anyone be thrown through the window?” we ask the waitress. She tells us there isn’t much of that here. In the evenings, it turns out, motorcycle riders like to eat and imbibe at SuWaller’s but during lunch, when we’ve arrived, it’s exactly what it looks like. A place where the office bees take a break from the hive.

SuWaller’s, we hasten to add, does look satisfyingly like a dive, at least from the outside. It’s on a corner of Overland that appears as if it’s trapped in a vortex that started swirling back in the Eisenhower Administration and has been going around in the same circle since. Inside, if you squint, you can probably picture a biker hangout but you really have to use your imagination.

A pool table’s pushed up against one wall. There are beer signs, neon and otherwise, in colorful profusion, suggesting one would not go far astray from convention in ordering a Budweiser product. Big ol’ bar at one end and stools and tall tables and a few booths. At one of those, we see there’s some trouble brewing but it turns out to be a lively argument about who’s pitching at the company team’s softball game that night. The lemonade arrives and the windows appear safe.

We’re not here for the beer, though. Or the lemondade. We here for the signature dish of SuWaller’s, the SuWaller’s Special.

Actually, we came for something called the Fat Bastard (right). It has a certain reputation, we’ve been told, in this part of town. The menu describes it as “TWO Grilled and Toasted Grilled Cheese sandwiches with a half-pound burger stuffed in the middle.”

It’s an imposing item, especially with the added note on the menu to try it "only if you dare.” We’re not sure we’re up to the dare of one grilled grilled cheese sandwich, let alone TWO, never mind the half-pound ‘o protein shoved inside, but dare we did. Along with an appetizer of Guacamole Bites. Which are wonton skins stuffed with mashed avocado and tomatoes and cream cheese, topped with jalapenos and a housemade salsa.

Around us, it’s hard to pick out a local favorite. Fried fish tacos. Cobblestones of meatloaf smothered in gravy, chicken fried steak. The daily special is a decidedly un-biker-ish chicken cordon bleu. When the Cardinals are playing, you can get a bucket of beer and enough wings to sustain you and your entire table through nine innings.

Turns out the Fat Bastard isn’t the only half-pound of beef featured on burgers here. The Frisco has fried onions, Thousand Island dressing, and Swiss cheese on a grilled sourdough bun—with a half-pound burger. The Mr. Spicy has bacon, pepper cheese, jalapenos, and fried onion rings—and a half-pound of burger. We don’t normally think of a Cuban sandwich as having a burger, but SuWaller’s is on a roll here, so their version has cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, some kind of secret sauce, and if you guessed burger, eight ounces worth, you’re starting to get the theme.

The Special arrives. It’s half a pound. Imagine our surprise. Instead of the burger, though, it’s roast beef and ham, topped with a thick sheet of gloppy Provel cheese, all packed into a long French loaf. With a cup of hot, beefy juice alongside for dipping. Probably not the sort of thing you want to tackle in evening wear, but then again, this isn’t a place where you dine before heading off to a performance of Der Wildschultz. It’s good. It’s a fine lunch. The side of onion rings, crunchy, sweet, salty, doesn’t hurt a bit.

The high-spirited chin-checkin’ we’d hoped to see actually transpired. It was on one of the wide screen TVs, where, as we worked our way through the Special, came breaking news of a linebacker for the Jets who’d punched the quarterback in an altercation and broke his jaw. The news did not result in a spontaneous brawl. Nothing more serious than a scuffle over the check at the next table over.

Maybe it’s more exciting at night. We asked the waitress how anybody could play pool with the table shoved up against the wall like it was and she told us they move it over there to accommodate the lunch crowd, then pull it back out into the room’s center for the evening. The rack of cues did not have any that looked to have been broken. The floor was scrupulously clean and what we thought might be a bloodstain on the table turned out to be a bit of marinara sauce from the beer-battered cheese bites.

So it’d probably be just fine for our biker editor to pull up to SuWaller’s Bar and Grill with all 160 cc wide open and come on in for lunch. Even so, you see a guy pull into the lot on a scooter in colors more befitting a prom dress, keep an eye on him. Man gets a couple of iced teas in him, he can get ugly.

SuWaller’s Bar & Grill

2010 N. Warson

314-426-2600

Lunch and dinner daily

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