This week, a new player has been added to the roster of restaurants at Ballpark Village.
Fielder’s Choice offers a light lunch and dinner menu, as well as breakfast served all day. From the owners of Festus-based Pine Mountain Country Coffee House & Mercantile, Amy and Frank Lowery, Fielder’s Choice marks the first restaurant at the downtown entertainment district to serve breakfast.
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Opening day is June 13. The inaugural hours (subject to change) are 7 a.m.–9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 7 a.m.–10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Here’s what to know before you go.
The Atmosphere
Located on the north side of One Cardinal Way, the 1,500-square-foot space seats 30 inside and an additional eight outside at sidewalk tables. Customers can self-order at a counter from digital menu boards. Designed by TAO + LEE Associates, the décor is subtle yet effective.
“As designers, TAO + LEE always look for that “something” that helps inspire our design approach,” says principal Peter Lee. “With Fielder’s Choice (not named at the project start) it became clear when Amy [client Amy Lowery] showed up all decked out in Cardinals gear and explained why she was at Ballpark Village. For the love of the Cardinals and baseball. So, for this location, we mutually wanted to acknowledge that we were in Cardinal Nation. And since the retail space was rather small, we decided to keep the design simple and uncluttered, recommending that the main surfaces be highlighted with baseball themed photos and graphics and selective positioning of Cardinal Red.”
On one wall is a photo mural of the former Busch Stadium II, selected because Fielder’s Choice is located roughly in left field. There are also red baseball-style stitched chairs in a six-seat lounge area, where wooden baseball bats are cleverly incorporated into the décor.
The Menu
The menu at Fielder’s Choice is similar to the one at Pine Mountain Country Coffee House & Mercantile. There are a dozen bagel options, including egg-and-meat breakfast basics, as well as roast beef and cheddar, turkey club, a Monte Cristo, and Little Italy (with three kinds of meat, pepperjack cheese, banana peppers, red onion, and Italian dressing). The bagel sandwiches are steamed, rather than toasted or grilled. “They’re hot, melty, and easy to eat,” says Lowery. Basic bagels (with regular and flavored cream cheese) and cream cheese-stuffed bagel “holes” are available as well.
The bagels come from New York-based Ess-a-Bagel, voted “the best bagels in NYC for 40 years,’ according to its website. “They’re big, but, more importantly, they’re the perfect texture for a bagel sandwich,” says Amy, noting that Ess-a bagels are only available in Missouri at Pine Mountain and Fielder’s Choice. “Getting Ess-a here was a year-long process.”
For the acai bowls, customers select a base, fresh fruit (strawberry, blueberry, banana, kiwi, pineapple), dry topping (granola, cacao nibs, chia seeds, shredded coconut), and a drizzle (honey or Reese’s Peanut Butter sauce).
Other breakfast offerings include sweet and savory Belgian “Waffles Your Way,” topped and drizzled to order, a breakfast parfait, baked mini-doughnuts in four flavors, full-size doughnuts from Daylight Donuts, and other breakfast staples, including omelets, avocado toast, and biscuits and gravy.
At lunch, in addition to bagel sandwiches, offerings include a build-your-own salad and a one-off novelty: a pickle sandwich, in which a dill pickle gets halved, hollowed out, and filled with steamed meats, cheese, and a sauce. “The idea was an offshoot of the pickle split—a banana split with a pickle instead—which went viral when we served it at Pine Mountain, says Amy. “The pickle sandwich was the follow-up, and it’s popular, too. There are a lot of pickle crazy people out there.”
As for dessert? Similar to at Pine Mountain Country Coffee House & Mercantile, the ice cream is sourced from Madison, Wisconsin–based Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream. Fielder’s Choice will initially offer seven flavors (served in cups, cones, and mini Cardinal baseball helmets), but Amy hopes to increase that number or open a separate, standalone ice cream shop nearby.
Lowery is excited about delivering to the residents at One Cardinal Way and to the eighth-floor pool that overlooks Busch Stadium. “We’ll do other catering, like bagel platters, and boxed lunches,” she says, “but we’re going to hold off on general delivery until we determine there’s a demand.”
The Backstory
Amy sold a business that she’d owned for more than a decade in 2021, when the opportunity arose to buy Pine Mountain in Festus. “Funny thing is, neither my husband nor I even like coffee, but once I tried a frappé, I was hooked,” she says.
Amy and Frank (who has his own business but acts as technical consultant) saw the opportunity to add more food to Pine Mountain’s menu and decided to buy the business. Additions included bagel sandwiches, the Wisconsin-sourced ice cream, and acai bowls. “We got to be known for all those things, so that business grew and continues to grow,” says Amy.
Originally from Ste. Genevieve, the longtime Cardinals fans lived in Herculaneum for 17 years before deciding to move to One Cardinal Way. “We sold our house and were planning to build another one,” Amy recalls, “but since we were huge Cardinal fans, we thought it might be fun to move into One Cardinal Way for a year or two and signed a lease on the 15th floor facing the stadium.”
They then began discussing the concept of a “same but different” companion restaurant to Pine Mountain. Because Ballpark Village didn’t have a place to grab breakfast and Pine Mountain had become renowned for its morning fare, they considered an offshoot restaurant. “We signed the apartment and restaurant leases at practically the same time and thought we’d tie it all together by naming our place Fielder’s Choice,” says Amy. “Now we don’t think we ever want to leave.”
