The baseball metaphors will be flying when the new Live! By Loews hotel opens later today. Part of the $260 million expansion at Ballpark Village, the hotel is located at 799 Clark Street, about a 700-foot home run from Busch Stadium. The eight-story hotel includes 216 rooms, four food-and-beverage concepts, and 17,000 square feet of event space. It’s one of 29 Loews properties but only the second Live! By Loews concept, hotels specifically located near entertainment venues.
Bourbon is the cornerstone of several of the hotels’ signature restaurants: Cut & Bourbon in Arlington, Texas, Bank & Bourbon in Philadelphia, and now Clark & Bourbon in St. Louis. The hotel’s other food-and-beverage options include the adjacent Whiskey Room, with private tastings available; The Bullock, a spectacular second-floor terrace; Bar Bourbon, featuring a central fireplace, multiple seating options, and an indoor and outdoor bar with patio; and River Market, with grab-and-go items, plus locally made retail products.
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Clark & Bourbon: Located on the ground floor, the signature restaurant (open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) is both classic and casual. Designed with glass doors on all sides, the main room can expand indoors or out to a small terrace facing Busch Stadium.
The chef is Matt Lange, who moved to St. Louis last fall from Chicago, where he was executive sous chef at the Loews Chicago Hotel. Lange says he brought along his sous chef team to minimize hiring issues and to lessen any speed bumps that might occur. To that end, he says, “Although I love the Midwest, I did not move to St. Louis for me. I moved here to properly cater to the clientele the best way possible.”
Speaking to the possible seasonality of the hotel restaurant, Lange says the intent was to bring a high-caliber restaurant to the St. Louis market that would attract St. Louisans to the restaurant year-round, not just during baseball season. Lange describes the unstuffy restaurant as “a place where you can grab burger and a beer or, just as easily, a $48 Delmonico and a dram of rare whiskey.”
Expect to see Lange on the dining-room floor. “Guests want to identify with and relate to the chef,” he says, “and I can say the same of them. I want to be as guest-facing as possible.” Lange will likely be serving some dishes and finishing others, including shaving fresh truffles onto fresh-made tagliatelle with Pecorino Toscano. (At $24, it’s perhaps be the best deal in the house.)
Emphasizing its versatility, Lange says Clark & Bourbon “can create a steakhouse memory but also be remembered for the Hot Sauce Fried Chicken,” of which he’s especially proud. A whole bird is served with homestyle grits and roasted local carrots with spiced honey. Priced at $48, it’s one of two “Dishes to Share.”
The menu’s From the Grill section (served a la carte) includes a prime strip and ribeye, a bone-in filet and 30-ounce tomahawk, an 18-ounce bone-in pork chop, and a rack of lamb. The “Plates for One” include a double-patty cheeseburger, a vegan “Beyond Meat” burger, the aforementioned tagliatelle, and a roasted airline breast of chicken from Joyce Farms served with a sauce made with pickled mustard seeds and Madeira-plumped raisins.
Sixty South farmed Atlantic salmon are raised in the Tierra Del Fuego area of southern Chile. A pan-seared version (see lead image) is glazed with misoyaki and served with preserved lemon farro, leeks, and pickled shallot. A tartare includes fresno shallot avocado aioli charred scallion aioli, pickled mustard seed, radishes, and house-made everything-spiced lavosh.
A braised and smoked short rib is glazed with gochujang and served with pickled carrot slaw and sliced bread from La Bonne Bouchee.
Other appetizers include crab cakes, colossal shrimp cocktail, and cheese and charcuterie boards. For something different, consider the togarashi-grilled Alaskan king crab, a first sighting in St. Louis.
Whiskey Room: Just off the main dining room is a private room concept that exists nowhere else in the Midwest—or maybe the entire U.S., according to corporate beverage director Grant Hewitt, who began conceiving this “destination within the destination” long before the St. Louis property ever broke ground.
Hewitt tasted 750 dark spirits from around the world before deciding on a roster of 480 whiskies geographically located on opposing walls, including “single bottles of 30- to 50-year-olds and the hot Japanese labels, which are getting impossible to find.”
The focal point of the room is the rear wall, lined with 48 10-liter barrels. As an homage to St. Louis, the bottom barrels contain barrel-aged spirits and cocktails using a Ezra Brooks bourbon that Hewitt hand-selected. (Ezra Brooks is owned by St. Louis company Luxco and distilled at Lux Row Distillers in Kentucky.)
Look closely at the collection of steamer trunks stowed beneath the bottles. They’re the St. Louis Cardinals’ team travel trunks from the early 1930s (“grey pants” trunk depicted above). Used during Prohibition, some were allegedly built with false bottoms to hold bottles of spirits.
The onsite cellarmaster will recommend a single dram or a whiskey flight, using proper service ware and service techniques: expect cut-glass, Glencairn snifters and choose from a large-format square cube, a whiskey stone, or an eyedropper containing distilled water. (Use just enough water for the whiskey to open up.) In the future, Hewitt says, large-format cubes may get carved and sculped with a torch.
The Whiskey Room “creates an opportunity to capture—or further engage—the guest,” Hewitt says. Patrons are encouraged to examine the world of whiskey at close range. Private tastings (and even dining) in the Whiskey Room can be arranged for two to 15 people.
Bar Bourbon: The hotel’s official bar boasts several seating areas, with multiple untraditional options: pillowy chairs, communal tables, private hideaways, a fireplace. With every added nook and love seat, the appeal broadens.
Throughout the space, references to baseball are present but subtle. Instead of pyramids of baseballs and framed, autographed jerseys hanging on the walls, there are lamps with barely noticeable baseball stitching. The black-and-gray granite bar shares its palette with upholstery that conjures old timers’ pinstripe uniforms. The back bar wall is actually an operable sliding glass door that opens to a mirror image bar and outside seating. (Translation: game day gold.)
The front desk is delineated with the numbers of retired Cardinal players. “We want to provide a different experience, on game days or any other, by presenting a sophisticated version of our homage to the Cardinals,” says Geneya Sauro, the hotel’s general manager. Loews’ lobby level is handsome, classy, and understated.
The Bullock: When the massive outdoor terrace on the second floor opens in a few months, there’s no doubt it will be popular before, after, and during baseball games (and likely just as popular when Busch Stadium is dark). The 809-person capacity space overlooks all of the action in Ballpark Village (including the happenings on the Busch II infield), but the Bullock has its own large-screen TV fronted by its own event lawn. There’s a long fire pit and groupings of soft seating divided by graduated planters. The prime space has its own menu of classic cocktails and American cuisine, and can be reserved for private gatherings. (The terrace takes its name from Tom Bullock, a pre-prohibition bartender who worked at St. Louis Country Club. Bullock was also the first African American to author a cocktail book in 1917.)
At present, access to The Bullock terrace is gained via the hotel’s second floor, past 10,000 square feet of breakout rooms (17,000 including the Bullock) and one of the more interesting art installations in the entirety of Ballpark Village, a sepia depiction of Busch II made entirely of opened books.
All of these amenities are on the first two floors of Live! By Loews. Just above are over 200 guest rooms, some with floor-to-ceiling views of the stadium and Ballpark Village. We’re hoping a staycation rate is available.
