We’ve long lamented why a town so steeped in French heritage has so few French restaurants. This week that number will be reduced by one. One we liked. A lot.
In a bittersweet capper to a three-day Valentine’s Day weekend, owner Tom Schmidt posted on Facebook last night that Franco (1535 S. Eighth, 314-436-2500) would close after service on Saturday, February 20.
Schmidt opened Franco 10 years ago on the ground floor of a former baby carriage factory directly behind the Soulard Farmers’ Market. Schmidt named the restaurant after his nephew, whose grinning, black & white visage above the front desk evoked smiles of its own.
Over the last decade, all the bistro favorites were aptly represented at Franco—escargots, French onion soup, foie, sweetbreads, steak frites, as well as an always-worthy cassoulet (above).
The restaurant was known for its old-meets-new interior, especially the calming waves of blond maple that floated overhead. Notably, Franco was the first restaurant designed by the now-prolific Tom Niemeier of SPACE Architecture + Design. Schmidt said he spent a year designing the restaurant himself and recalls Niemeier saying it would have been a mistake had it been done his way. Schmidt took a look at Niemeier’s preliminary sketches—incorporating whitewashed brick, barn wood, and a symphony of laminated wood panels (above)—and recalls saying “well, of course,” in an I’m-25-and-what-do-I-know kind of admission.
In addition, Franco may have been the most wrongly-pronounced restaurant in town (it’s frahnco, not frank-o) and this author made that abundantly clear here.
Contacted by SLM this morning, Schmidt conceded that most restaurants indeed have a life span and that 10 years was a respectable run. When asked if there was anything specific that caused the closure, Schmidt noted that Franco thrived when he was in house six nights per week (“Franco was an intimate place…and customers wanted to feel the same intimacy with the owner”) but with young kids at home and a very busy second restaurant (Salt + Smoke), said that was getting harder and harder to do.
When it was suggested that Franco could become a second Salt + Smoke, Schmidt said he would never compete with his friends at nearby Bogart’s, but without giving details said that Salt + Smoke was, however, entering “a growth stage.”
