Meet the restaurateurs behind some of St. Louis' best international cuisine

Devi Gurung States

Everest Café

After his parents died when he was 15, States spent a year living on the streets of Kathmandu, digging meals from trash cans. One day, an American doctor who had climbed nearby Mount Everest discovered the teenager at work, busing tables, and offered to adopt him and bring him back to the U.S. for schooling. “I asked my father, ‘What can I do to pay you back?’” States recalls. “He said, ‘Help people.’” In 2004, with a master’s in social work from SLU and a decade’s experience working for the health department, States opened his restaurant. Everest Café not only serves healthy homemade Indian food but also hosts free cholesterol and blood sugar screenings every Sunday and promotes States’ nonprofit work building hospitals and schools back in Nepal.

Lawrence Chen

Private Kitchen, Soup Dumplings STL

Americans are always in a hurry. So when Chen opened his first restaurant, in 1997, he served Americanized Chinese cuisine—what he terms fast food. It was nearly two decades before he felt that St. Louisans were ready to slow down and try authentic dishes from his native Shanghai. Since 2015, Private Kitchen has introduced diners to smoked fish, braised shrimp, and soup dumplings in an upscale setting. But as Chen’s cooking, particularly the dumplings, grew more popular, patrons demanded more, and earlier this year he opened Soup Dumplings STL, where people can get their Chen fix in less than 20 minutes.

Natasha Bahrami

Café Natasha’s

Bahrami was born here in 1982 to Iranian immigrants who, the next year, would introduce Persian cuisine to a town where Chinese food was still exotic. Bahrami and the city’s international cuisine have literally grown up together. “It’s been fun to watch citizens becoming comfortable with these new flavors,” says Bahrami, who now runs Café Natasha’s with her mother, Hamishe Bahrami. Customers have come to embrace more than just her mother’s Middle Eastern cooking. “After 9/11, when no one would come in, the community banded together and made a service announcement, and we were packed the next day,” she says. “When our windows got broken out during Ferguson, before I could even get there, neighbors were already out cleaning up the glass.”

Suchin Prapaisilp

Global Foods Market, King & I, Oishi Sushi, United Provisions

For Prapaisilp, the food business is about family. Born in Thailand, he joined his brother in St. Louis in 1975. He soon ran out of money and dropped out of SLU. The brothers were looking for an opportunity and noticed that despite the city’s abundance of war refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, there was nowhere to buy Asian groceries. The two opened Global Foods, selling noodles, fish sauce, and rice paper. Gradually, the brothers have built a local empire, including two groceries and several sushi eateries, which Prapaisilp hopes to one day leave to his son Sane. “We started with no money or knowledge,” he says. “We worked hard. Sane has everything set, but I’ve told him he has to work side by side with our employees and talk to the customers. You learn from them.”

Ally Nisbet

The Scottish Arms, The Shaved Duck

When he moved here from Aberdeen, two decades ago, Nisbet was almost immediately homesick for Scotland. He sought to drown the sorrow in Scotch at an authentic Scottish bar. The problem: He couldn’t find one in St. Louis—and thus was The Scottish Arms born in his mind. It took seven more years of planning and saving before the vision was realized in an old Victorian-style pub in the CWE. “We show people in St. Louis what a Scottish bar is,” says Nisbet. “Scottish culture, food, and single-malt whiskey.” More than anything, he says, it’s also about Highland hospitality—making patrons feelat home.

Tatyana Telnikova

Handlebar, Propaganda

Born in Moscow and moving here by way of Vienna and New York, the Russian restaurateur and barkeep got into the business because of what happens around good food and drink. “I feel like the true interactions happen in restaurants and bars,” she says. “That’s where people tell their stories, get things off their chests, celebrate, or get drunk and sad about something—the most honest parts of life. I love facilitating that.”