St. Louis-based restaurant group OG Hospitality has announced the opening of four new restaurants in 2020.
Construction is currently underway on a new location of Corner Pub and Grill, set to open early this summer at 2931 Highway K in O’Fallon, Missouri. Situated near The Shack Breakfast and Lunch, the 8,000-plus-square-foot complex will feature extensive outdoor seating, 20 beers on tap, more than 40 TV screens, and four sport courts. “Two sport courts were originally going to be bocce ball courts, but we ran out of room,” says co-owner Brant Baldanza. “So we came up with a game—with a lot of drinks in hand—called Baldango Ball, a mixture of lawn bowling and curling.”
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The Shack Breakfast and Lunch will also expand beyond St. Louis, with two new locations in Nashville and one in the Kansas City suburb of Lenexa, Kansas. The Lenexa location is slated to open as soon as early spring; two other Shack locations opened in Overland Park in 2018.
The forthcoming Music City locations are set to open this autumn and mark OG Hospitality’s first southward expansion. The first location will be in a booming area of downtown Nashville called The Gulch. The second will be in the McEwen Northside development, situated in the suburb of Franklin. (See rendering below.) Both Nashville restaurants will feature more than 4,000 square feet of dining space and fully enclosed four-season patios.
After launching four locations in 2018, the St. Louis-based company spent most of last year strategizing for continued growth. “When we doubled in size in 2018, we realized there are things that we always can do better,” says Baldanza, who’s a managing owner alongside Jon Fogarty. “Our goal was to streamline how we function as a company,” in order to achieve a 20 percent growth path each year.
Noting that OG Hospitality’s ownership group is now the same as when it launched in 2007, Baldanza says the group shares the same core values about how to grow and, at the same time, continue its commitment to community involvement.
“We’ve always concentrated on hospitality and doing things right, but part of that is being active in the community,” says Baldanza. “That must continue to be a focal point of our restaurants… When you have that culture and story, people want to be part of it.”
