Courtesy of Sunday Best
For a decade now, John Perkins’ name has been synonymous with outstanding, Southern-inflected fare, thanks to his celebrated restaurant, Juniper. Opened nearly a decade ago, the Central West End eatery became the city’s definitive Southern table by providing customers with an elevated take on such dishes as shrimp and grits, country ribs, and catfish—but it was its fried chicken that put the restaurant on the map.
Although Juniper ended its run last month, Perkins is determined to keep that fried chicken magic alive, making it the centerpiece of his new concept, Sunday Best (4101 Laclede), which opens to the public this Friday. He admits that the rebrand is bittersweet—saying goodbye to such a labor of love as Juniper is not easy—but he takes comfort in the idea that the fried chicken–focused, more casual concept is what he was meant to do all along.
“I had to be honest with myself that people came to Juniper for fried chicken,” Perkins says. “Eighty percent of what we sold was fried chicken, and we were spending all of this money to produce dishes that didn’t drive the bottom or top line. I’d been working on the idea for Sunday Best for years as a drive-thru concept, but when we weighed it out, the absolute best option was to merge the two concepts—to take Juniper and turn it into Sunday Best.”
The Concept
Four years ago, when Perkins started working out the idea of what would become Sunday Best, he envisioned it as a quick-service, casual fried chicken spot with a drive-thru while Juniper would remain his more upscale, broader Southern restaurant.
The Sunday Best concept that will open Friday is a marriage of those two concepts: table service but more casual and with a lower price point, fried chicken centric but with a handful of other dishes to round out its menu. Diners familiar with the Juniper model will notice a paired-down bill of fare, a more family-friendly atmosphere—complete with a kids' menu—a smaller bar and much quicker ticket times.
“It’s just going to be a more casual style of service—think Mission Taco or Salt + Smoke,” Perkins says. “Servers will be rocking Sunday Best T-shirts, and though there will be touches here and there that elevate service, being stiff and formal is not the point—and I’ve been telling the servers that if it takes longer than five minutes for somebody to get a drink, I need to know about it. We’re trying to make it super-quick and speed up the whole dinner experience, not to the point of being uncomfortable but quicker.”
The Menu
Photo by Lucas Peterson
For years, Perkins felt a tension between being happy for the accolades that his fried chicken received and feeling pigeonholed into being thought of solely as a fried chicken restaurant when he and his team put effort into being something more. When Eater named Juniper one of the best places for fried chicken in the country last summer, however, it was a wake-up call.
“It was obvious to me that Juniper wasn’t working, and I can be—and have been—quite stubborn at times in wanting to force something to work,” Perkins says. “There was a part of me that thought if I could just stick with it long enough, it would catch on but started listing options and fundamentally had zero clarity on what I was supposed to do. When the Eater stuff came out, I was talking to my brother, who's a chef in Washington state, and he said, ‘Dude, pack it up and become a fried chicken restaurant.’ I had to be honest with myself that people come here for the fried chicken. Once I realized that, it was like the fog was lifted.”
In that spirit, Sunday Best revolves around Perkins’ famous fried bird: a pressure-fried breaded chicken that he and his team have been perfecting for as long as he can remember. Served in either two-, four-, or eight-piece portions, the chicken will be available original, hot or very hot. Two- and four-piece servings will come with one side dish, and the eight-piece will come with two. Perkins will be cooking the bird in a combination of oil and tallow to create crispier product that holds its crispiness longer. And for the hot and very hot styles, he will be using schmaltz instead of oil as the spice canvas.
Other offerings include oysters, served raw or grilled, a smoked catfish dip with benne crackers, and Juniper’s beloved chicken sandwich, which can be prepared fried or grilled. Side dishes are a mix of the familiar—mashed potatoes with potlicker gravy, mac and cheese, collard greens—with such new dishes as street corn, a tomato cucumber salad with dill, and a Sea Island red pea salad with preserved lemon.
Perkins is also excited about the smaller beverage list. Cocktails include a handful of draft selections and some three-ingredient highballs.
"We dropped the price on things across the board,” Perkins says. “It’s a little scary because, on the one hand, I don’t want to say goodbye to revenue, but this is about creating value for people. Everything is so darn expensive now; I’d like to think we will be rewarded by offering a bit of a break, at least compared to what we used to charge.”
The Backstory
Perkins came on the St. Louis dining scene a little over a decade ago through a series of underground pop-up dinners under the name the Clandestine Chef, then moved into the catering brand Entre before launching two other pop-ups called Le Coq and a Good Man Is Hard To Find. He opened Juniper in 2013 and immediately garnered acclaim for his creative interpretations of classic Southern dishes. Originally located north of Lindell on Boyle Avenue, the restaurant moved to a larger location on Laclede Avenue in 2018. Perkins continued to build upon its success, employing such talented chefs as Jeff Friesen, Matthew Daughaday, and Daniel Poss. (Cassy Vires, another talented Juniper alum, worked at the original location on Boyle.) The restaurant received acclaim, though Perkins often found himself feeling like things just weren’t clicking. Although diners were clearly telling him what they wanted—a fried-chicken restaurant—he was not willing to let go of the more upscale concept that he had in mind when he came on the scene in the late aughts.
During and following the pandemic, Perkins knew something needed to change, but it was during a battle with cancer over the past year that Perkins found himself asking big questions—and being open to the answers. “To be honest, I’m kind of embarrassed it took me so long,” Perkins says. “There have been messages to me over the years, sometimes explicit, that I should have done this years ago, but for whatever reason, I wanted to keep doing what I was doing and didn’t really pay attention to them. In a lot of ways, I fetishized grit and determination to keep plugging away at this. It’s been unwise, but I kept doing it and took pride in the fact that I was a stubborn S.O.B., and it wasn’t going to beat me. But what do you have to show for it?”
Once Perkins allowed himself to let go of what he thought Juniper should be, he was able to achieve a sense of clarity. Sunday Best, he is confident, is the answer he’s been waiting for, the one that’s been there all along. Diners saw it, and he’s betting that they will continue to see it and support the restaurant. That thought is what makes him more hopeful about his restaurant than he has been for quite a while.
“For a long time, I have thought very sentimentally about Juniper, and that has prevented me from feeling wisely,” he says. "And it's understandable why I thought that way about it. It wasn’t a wrong or horrible thing to do, but in viewing it in the way I did I wasn’t able to analyze it in a clear or honest way. So here I am now. It’s time for a new decision-making process, and we will see what happens.”
