Renowned restaurant Cleveland-Heath is changing hands.
The good news: The beloved Edwardsville establishment will remain unchanged—same name, same food, same management team, same kitchen staff, same commitment to the charitable community.
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The bad news: Owners Jenny Cleveland and Eric “Ed” Heath, two of the most respected chefs in the business, will likely be moving to Utah—but not immediately.
Although the restaurant officially changes hands September 1, Heath will be around for another month. And though both owners “will be less day to day,” says Cleveland, they are “willing to help out indefinitely with whatever is needed.”
The new owners are Keith and Kari McGinness, a restaurant couple with ties to the area. (She’s from St. Louis; he grew up in Collinsville.) Kari has managed independent restaurants and will run the front of the house. Keith’s background is in corporate restaurants, most recently as director of operations for 25 Applebee’s locations, so his role will be more organizational.
“Keith is far better at operations and management than either Ed or me. We ran a nice restaurant, but where we may have failed was in providing systems and structure for our people. They’ll be in more qualified hands now,” says Cleveland. “We started this thing when we were so young and inexperienced, and we’ve done everything with it that our skill set can do. We felt it was best to pass it to qualified people who can provide new skills and new energy.”
Keith’s corporate background allowed him to see the value in the strength of a brand, so he isn’t looking to fix something that’s not broken. “If it feels different here in six months, then I’m doing something wrong,” he says.
Both the new and existing owners have been working together at the restaurant for some time. “When we told the staff about the transition a few days ago, it didn’t come as a big shock,” says Cleveland. “They had an opportunity to get to know and like [the McGinnesses] ahead of time.”
The McGinnesses had been looking for a restaurant opportunity for a number of years, but the decision was easy when they met Cleveland and Heath. “They were so wonderful, we would have befriended them under any circumstances,” says Keith. “It just so happened they owned a great restaurant.”
Of utmost concern to Cleveland and Heath is not the change itself, but the public’s perception of it. “We’re worried about the way people get the message,” Cleveland says. “We’re so appreciative of the community, our staff, and our customers. We’ve been able to accomplish so much here that we don’t want to appear ungrateful. From day one, we we’ve been blown away by all of the support. I hope that people understand we’re not turning our backs. It isn’t a farewell. We still have a house and family here and relationships that we want to maintain.
“And who knows?” she adds. “If things don’t work out, I might come back here and ask Keith and Kari if they need a bartender.”
Heath is originally from Utah and made several trips there recently, getting reacquainted with his family and Pub Group, a restaurant company that previously employed the couple. (They met while working at Desert Edge Brewery in Salt Lake City, one of the company restaurants). After stints in northern California (Cleveland at Per se and French Laundry, Heath at JoLe), they moved closer to Jenny’s home in mid-state Illinois and opened Cleveland-Heath. “He’s given me seven years here with my family,” Cleveland says. “It’s time for me to return the favor.”
With Pub Group, “there may be room for us to make an impact. They have four different restaurants, including Martine, where Ed worked a little bit last year,” says Cleveland. “While we’re sad to be leaving the greatest thing we’ve ever done, our opinions were the biggest ones in the room; sometimes, we got hung up making a big decision, and then something would come up and we put it off so nothing got done. I look forward to working in a group where our opinions are not the only ones that matter. That’s how you grow, learning from other people.”
Since its inception, Cleveland-Heath was a restaurant darling on both sides of the river. Catching word of the acclaimed restaurant, St. Louisans would unwittingly dress up to make the 45-minute drive, only to encounter a casual staff and vibe. As Cleveland said in this Q&A with SLM, “They’d arrive blind, expect fine dining, then see plaid shirts. It was strike one for them, and they just walked in.” When they walked out, however, it was a different story.
The restaurant attracted a diverse crowd. As Cleveland recalls, “One night, a nicely dressed couple drove here from across the river and loved it—as did another couple, but they ate here before heading up the street to get tattoos.”
It wasn’t uncommon to hear superlatives and that Cleveland-Heath served some of the best comfort food in the entire metro region—a draw that the new owners plan to continue. “The GM and daytime manager are the same, as is the executive chef,” says Keith.
Chef Rick Kazmer is a contemporary of Cleveland and Heath who attended the Culinary Institute of America with them. “Rick has been running our kitchen for five years, almost since we opened,” says Cleveland. “He’s always done a lot of the work, yet received little of the attention. Now he will.”
Credit Kazmer for the lemony kale salad, hearty pork posole, an Instagram-inducing pork chop, the grass-fed cheeseburger, and a pineapple rum gooey butter cake that garnered an entire page in SLM‘s August issue.
“Bittersweet is a word I‘ve been using a lot lately,” Cleveland says, “but what’s important is that nothing will have changed except us being there. We’re confident that if a customer hadn’t heard the news, they wouldn’t know the difference.”
