A conversation with restaurateur Derek Deaver, owner of Three Kings Pub and Casa de Tres Reyes

Name: A conversation with restaurateur Derek Deaver, owner of Three Kings Pub and Casa de Tres Reyes
Item: Casa de Tres Reyes
Author: George Mahe

Today, Deaver oversees four Three Kings Public House locations and two Casa de Tres Reyes spots, with one of each at the airport.

by George Mahe

January 3, 2023

10:57 AM

Kevin A. Roberts

When he was younger, Derek Deaver contemplated becoming a commercial pilot. “Then I crashed a plane,” he says offhandedly, “and kind of lost interest.” After a failed restaurant in Reno (“We left St. Louis in a U-Haul on 9/11,” he says. “I should have known.”), Deaver chose a different flight path and now owns six successful local restaurants: four Three Kings Pubs and two Casa de Tres Reyes—one of each, ironically enough, located at the airport.

When did you get your first taste of the restaurant business? In high school, I was working at Dierbergs as a bagger and a stocker. My friend was working at Duffy’s with all these cute girls making tons of money in tips…and I was stocking shelves. So I got a job at Duffy’s, first as a busboy and then in the kitchen—because I thought that’s where all the cool guys were—but I’m 6 foot 5, and I kept banging my head on the hood and my skin was breaking out from all the grease, so I went back on the floor and later became a server, where I made tons of money. So that’s how all this started.

What other career path might you have chosen? My dad was a commercial pilot, and I thought that’s what I might want to do. So I got my pilot’s license when I was a sophomore in college. While working toward my instrument rating, seated next to my instructor in a Cessna 152, I crashed it. We had a fuel problem over Washington, Missouri, and had to put it down in a field, flipping twice. I don’t know whatever happened to him, but I kind of lost interest. That was it for me.

What did you do then? I went back to Mizzou, where I went to school along with working two jobs, as a bartender and a server at the Holiday Inn Executive Center, Tuesday through Friday. Then I’d drive home to work Saturday night at Duffy’s, a double Sunday, and then drive back to Columbia and be ready for school on Monday. I was taking 12 hours, so it was crazy but doable.

When did you know that you would become a restaurateur? After I graduated, I worked at Duffy’s as a glorified bartender/manager, working five nights a week, making like $70,000 a year, which was a lot in the mid-’90s. I was traveling to Europe and saving money, so I decided to get serious about the restaurant business. I opened and closed a restaurant in Reno, went broke, moved back to St. Louis when I was 31, and lived in my parents’ basement in West County. It was the worst time of my life.

Welcome to the School of Hard Knocks. An uncle had taken over an existing restaurant, he offered me a job, and a few years later, my parents and I bought him out. That was Deaver’s Bar, and it stayed open for 14 years.

Deaver’s Bar was practically an institution. What made it so popular? The food was solid—we had a great burger and great wings—but we were across from Koch Ballpark, which hosted all kinds of athletic events all the time, so location was a big part of it. When Michael Brown got shot in 2014, business declined slowly but steadily. I opened up Three Kings in 2011, opened Des Peres in 2014—which was gangbusters—and ended up closing Deaver’s the next year. Basically, I was stretched too thin, it was no longer making much money, and the lease was up for renewal. We opened SoCo in 2017 and at the airport the year after that.

How did the airport location come about? They were soliciting independent restaurants, but Three Kings was not on the consideration list for consideration. Rhonda [Hamm-Niebruegge], the airport director, who happens to be a customer, got me a late invite, we got selected, and it ended up being the best deal in the world. We were able to use our existing suppliers—fresh chicken breast and wings, fresh ground Angus meat—which was important in maintaining quality and consistency from store to store, which made a huge difference. That year, we won 2^nd best airport bar in USA Today. On top of that, before we opened there, Three Kings was averaging 10,000 unique website visits per month. Now we get close to twice that many.

So what happened Beer, Biscuits, and BBQ, the other concept you opened out there? The food was really good, but at the end of the day, barbecue doesn’t lend itself to airports. It’s too messy, too saucy… Plus, it was open about six months before the pandemic hit and closed it for good.

But that’s not the end of the story. When the dust settled, and I knew I was doing Casa de Tres Reyes in Des Peres, I approached the airport with that idea. People love Mexican, it’s fast, it travels well, and there was no Mexican food in Terminal 2. So we put that in where Beer, Biscuits and BBQ was. Four months in, it’s already doing triple the sales.

Do you have any advice for young people who know they want to get into the restaurant business? People will disagree, but if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t even have gone to college. I’d go straight to work in the business for a person who really knows what they’re doing and then a corporate place after that to learn their systems. They drum them into people because they work. I didn’t have much of that before opening my first place and now, years later, we’re finally getting our systems to where they should have been when we opened.

How did Three Kings Pub get started? Derek Flieg, Ryan Pinkston and I were all SAE’s at Mizzou. We lived together and worked together at the Holiday Inn Exec Center. After college, Ryan was my right hand man in Reno, and became my manager at Deaver’s. Derek ended up as the bar manager at Riddles, so when it went into play, Derek thought we should make a move, and we did. The landlords, Barb and Bob Subieri, could have chosen several different groups to take the place over. Fortunately, they chose us and we’ve been close ever since. I hope to buy the building whenever they decide to sell.

How did you come up with the Three Kings name? There were three of us, so we were thinking threes… We came upon a Three Kings Public House in a town outside of London that had been closed for a few years, which referenced Elvis, King Kong, and Henry VIII. We contacted the owner, got his blessing to use the name, and did legal due diligence. People ask why we didn’t swap out one of them for St. Louis—Louis IX—and the answer is we were so caught up in stuff, we never thought of it.

What distinguishes Three Kings from a standard bar and grill? We were aiming for what we called “high-end pub, low-end gastropub” food. Somewhere else we called it “upper-middle-class pub fare,” both of which accurately describe what we aspire to be. I wanted to go several steps up from a place like Deaver’s, and we did that by adding a substantial digital draft beer list that keeps track of everything in real time.

Did you enlist a chef to help ratchet up the food? Gary Suarez, who had been running the foodservice for Washington University, came on a few months in and did just that, adding things like more specialty burgers, tuna sliders, seafood stew, and Moroccan spiced pork shanks. He totally solidified and advanced the menu. Then a guy named Anthony Redden came on and added our famous Captain Crunch Shrimp, the Flamethrower burger, he took our wings to another level, to the point that we started winning chicken wing competitions. We now have a bunch of Latino guys and women running the kitchens and everything’s great.

What made the Loop location take off like it did? It did take off but it took awhile, because people came in and wanted Riddles, their food, quartinos of wine... Plus, Blueberry Hill was doing well, as was Cicero’s, so it took us awhile to penetrate all that. Most were doing live music, and we did, too, because we thought we had to. Six months in, which is also when Gary started, we stopped the live music and started late night happy hours, which attracted industry people and college kids—and boom!—that was the spark that took us to the next level.

Having that great draft beer program didn’t hurt. Thank Derek [Fleig] for that. He insisted on having a bunch of kickass local beers which set us apart as well. Twenty-four taps, 30 at Des Peres. If I were to do it all over, 20 is the magic number: 10 on hand all the time and 10 that rotate. We tried doing batched cocktails but they never were as good as the handmade ones, so we stopped.

How did the Des Peres location come about? Deaver’s was on the wane, the Delmar Three Kings was doing fine, but as far as supporting three guys—and me with two kids—we needed more. I grew up in West County, I like West County, and I thought we should just roll the dice and do it. Even though it was way more expensive than U. City, but when we studied the density and income metrics there, it totally made sense. Tao Lee’s buildout was cool and we were jam packed for a year. That’s when I decided to close Deaver’s.

Then came South County. I took out a huge SBA loan to do that location and it does good numbers, but I was used to juggernaut Des Peres numbers. Covid definitely affected that location—when Ronnie’s temporarily closed down—but I received Covid credits because of my SBA loan. Had I not had it—and used a conventional loan—I hate to think what would have happened.

How did the pandemic change a place like Three Kings? There are a lot of places that were fun places to go but had mediocre food. When COVID hit and places closed for a time, all you were left with was their mediocre food to-go, which was why I think many of them closed. The places with good food—which Three Kings was—still had to figure out the pickup and delivery angle, which we had already done. We were in good shape.

Three Kings became a “master of the pandemic pivot.” What different things did you do, and why were you more successful? For starters, we didn’t want to raise prices but reluctantly did so, increasing the portion size in many cases—like taking the chicken breast size from seven ounces up to eight—which justified the price increase. Long story short, our pick-up and delivery business remained strong even after the pandemic subsided. Beforehand, we were doing 15 percent takeout; during the pandemic, it went up to 60 percent, and now we’re holding at 25 to 30 percent, which isn’t bad for a non-pizza, non-Asian type of place, and I attribute that to the quality of the food.

You were also doing self-delivery. When third-party delivery started, those companies were charging restaurants a fortune, which has moderated somewhat, so it now makes sense to use them. And if the customer places an order on our website, they pay the same menu price as if ordering in person, whether they pick it up or have it delivered by DoorDash, which didn’t used to be the case.

At the outset of the pandemic, you provided a lot of free food and food at cost to the medical community and the first responders. We went from wanting to do something good for people one day to wondering how we were going to pay our bills the next, and then were so thankful when those people came back to us later and bought box lunches for the office at full price.

How did the pandemic change you as a person? Besides the above example, I learned that things do come back to you. I provided a free meal for employees and half off for their families during the pandemic and earned some loyalty. Now they get a free meal every shift they work.

Pandemic worries have been replaced by inflation and price increases. So when the price of chicken wings triples for an extended period, do you take them off the menu or charge triple for them? We went from to $11 per order to $13.99 and held that price even after the wholesale price went way up again. It’s come back down, but now we need to make up for lost revenue. Recently, the cost of romaine lettuce has gone up by 250 percent, so we’ll eat that loss unless that it becomes unbearable.

Photo by George Mahe

Why Casa de Tres Reyes? Why the shift to a Mexican concept? There’s not much Mexican food in the Des Peres area, our food is different, and I learned that during COVID, Mexican food was just behind pizza/pasta as a takeout food, ahead of even Asian. So when I heard that Rib City was leaving, our wheels started turning. Plus, I had all of these Latino guys in the kitchen who are dying to do something like this.

Photo by Cheryl Baehr

Chefs Marcos Godines and Andrew Cisneros

Did you do any R&D? We did. My wife and I went all across the country, decided we wanted something elevated, and hoped Andrew Cisneros was available to consult. He was interested but had recently opened Jalea in St. Charles and a concept at Perennial, his availability was limited. I lost my lead guy a few weeks before I was planning to open but Andrew knew of a very qualified guy, Marcos Godines, who had worked at Publico, then for Rick Bayless, then moved to San Francisco. He seemed interested but had just moved back to Southern Illinois. He was indecisive, and I was desperate, so I drove to Southern Illinois and started blowing up his phone. He was, Well, I dunno, and I said, Dude, I’m sitting here in your Starbucks. Let’s talk. We did, and he said, When do you need me? I said, Right now. He said, Yeah, but I have nowhere to live. I told him I had a furnished apartment above the Delmar location that he could have for free until he got settled. It wasn’t exactly furnished, but a friend, my wife, and Amazon got it that way in a few days. Bottom line: He’s my new head chef; he and Andrew attracted other people—Cuban guys, a Peruvian guy, white guys—all who wanted to learn from them. Plus, these guys are kicking out next level stuff in less than nine minutes. I couldn’t be happier.

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