The first and only St. Louis restaurant/bar to boast swinging bar seats is closing after almost two decades in downtown Maplewood. Last night, the owner of Boogaloo (7344 Manchester) announced that the Caribbean-themed restaurant and bar would close after service on Saturday, June 15, and to “swing on by” (its tagline) one last time.
The Instagram post read, in part, “We have been a staple in St. Louis for 19 years as the ‘bar with the swings’. Share your favorite memories of your time at Boogaloo… It’s been a swinging good time; farewell to all.”
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Dan Powers runs the kitchen and has owned the restaurant for over a decade. Dan’s father, Tom Powers, says that sales never really recovered after the pandemic. “Combined with escalating food and labor costs, we’ve been in that ‘hanging in there, barely’ mode for a while,” Tom says. “Our sales level is not that different than it was nine years ago, and a lot of the costs have doubled. That pretty much sums it up right there.”
Reached this morning, Dan Powers says that, in retrospect, he questions his decision to remain open during the pandemic. “It was costly to do that,” he says, “but it seemed like the right thing to do in an unprecedented time.” Powers says he’s been amazed at the outpouring of support he’s received over the last 24 hours and plans to take some time off after June 15. “I’ll most likely stay in the industry, here in St. Louis,” he says. “There’s a lot going on here.”
The Backstory
Tom Powers opened Boogaloo in 2005 with chef Mike Johnson, who helped design and build the restaurant, in addition to creating the “Cubano, Creole, Caribe” menu. It was Johnson who came up with the logo, and it was his idea to hang swings at the bar, after having seen a similar setup at a beach bar in Playa del Carmen called The Blue Parrot. (He was surprised at the amount of support steel required to pull it off, he noted at the time.)
Johnson and Powers traded ownership percentages over the years, until Dan Powers assumed sole ownership in 2012, at which point Dan (who’d been a sous chef at Schlafly Bottleworks) also took over as executive chef.
From the start, Boogaloo’s menu was as innovative as its bar swings. Standard Caribbean staples (jerk chicken, roasted plantains, ropa vieja, black bean soup) shared menu space with Cajun and Creole dishes (New Orleans BBQ Shrimp, jambalaya, blackened chicken fettuccine), as well as outliers (for instance, Brazil nut–encrusted manchego cheese, conch fritters, snapper escovitch, and Cuban paella).
Boogaloo’s cocktail menu was robust and reasonably priced. Happy hour specials were offered both early and late, but “five good months were never going to overcome the seven that weren’t,” Tom says.
The restaurant plans to keep standard lunch and dinner hours this week and throttle back to evenings only next Wednesday through Saturday.
