The long-awaited second concept from Little Fox owners Craig and Mowgli Rivard has opened in Fox Park. Located across the street from Little Fox, Sur Lie (2805 Shenandoah) is a wine-focused bistro and bottle shop that will offer a lower-priced experience built around carefully selected wines, a creative cocktail program featuring “freezer-door” martinis, and a concise menu of small plates and small-format entrées. Add in the kind of welcoming neighborhood atmosphere that invites guests to linger, and Sur Lie might just become an all-day gathering place. Here’s what to know before you go.
The Atmosphere
Sur Lie was first envisioned after an opportunity that the Rivards couldn’t ignore. When the building across the street from Little Fox came up for sale, the owner approached them. “Like most chefs, we have a lot of concepts floating around in our heads,” Craig says. “This just happened to be the one that fit.”
With seating for 48 guests indoors, as well as an upcoming 16-seat sidewalk patio, Sur Lie is intentionally intimate. The main dining room accommodates 32 guests, while a private back room seats eight to 16 and is available for special events and private dining.
The overarching goal was to create a design-forward space where people feel equally comfortable stopping in for a glass of wine or settling in for the evening, with a feel unmistakably different from Little Fox. Working with architect and designer Jay Reeves of Fox Park-based Scribe Design Office, the couple opted for a darker, moodier aesthetic with medium green and earth tones, textured wallpaper, custom cherry tables with green leather inlays from Theo Kaufman Cabinetry & Furniture, neutral wood chairs, and upholstered banquettes. The millwork, from Richard Higby Design, was built offsite to minimize noise. “We have tenants upstairs,” Mowgli says. “While it was possible to build everything here, I’m sure they’re glad that we didn’t.”
The Rivards pored over the details, from delicate water carafes and pleasantly squat glasses set atop thick, branded coasters to gold-colored flatware, as well as wall photography that Mowgli hopes will stir memories of travel. Even the olive/khaki green-and-adobe/clay red color palette was carefully considered. “We weren’t totally obsessive about it, but let’s just say there were quite a few paint samples on the walls before we landed on the right combination,” Mowgli says.
In the near future, Sur Lie will operate as a bottle shop during the day, initially offering 125 wines—priced for either on-premise consumption or take-home purchase—along with espresso drinks and light snacks. Like many restaurants with a retail wine program, the bottle shop will offer two-tiered pricing: one price for bottles consumed on-site and another for bottles purchased to go.
Lunch service will likely follow, though only after the Rivards gauge neighborhood demand. They’ll first launch a corporate catering program, which they believe fills an underserved niche in the area.
Reservations will be accepted, and there will be tables set aside for walk-ins. “We have guests who drive in from a distance who need to know they have a reservation,” Mowgli says. “We’re happy to accommodate that request.”
The Menu
Despite the restaurant’s compact footprint, Craig is quick to point out that Sur Lie is far more than a wine bar with snacks. Guests can stop in during the day for espresso or a bottle to go, then return in the evening for a different experience centered on wine, cocktails, and dinner. And in a deliberate bit of dovetailing, Sur Lie will open an hour before Little Fox and stay open an hour later. “We’re calling it a wine-led bistro, but it’s a complete restaurant,” he says.
The one-page dinner menu features 18 savory dishes that lean European without belonging to any single country. Portions are smaller than those at Little Fox, and prices are generally lower, but the menu is designed to encourage guests to build a meal rather than simply graze.
The inaugural menu includes East Coast oysters brightened by Champagne mignonette, lapsang souchong tea tincture, and tomato granita; a dry-aged meatball with Taleggio, butter bean purée, and gremolata; and a fresh Kona crab cocktail accompanied by puffy, house-made butter crackers you’ll wish were sold by the box.
A standout is the impossibly thin potato chips, layered with Prosciutto di Parma, drizzled with tomato-pepper aioli, and dotted with piparra peppers whose delicate stems can—and should—be eaten. You may never again pay $17 for potato chips, but you won’t soon forget these.
More substantial offerings include mushroom lasagna, beef tenderloin au poivre, and shaved roast beef with au jus and horseradish served on a kummelweck roll, aka “beef on weck,” a popular sandwich in Buffalo, New York, where Mowgli grew up.
Other dishes with personal connections include confit egg yolk with house bread, an extension of Little Fox’s popular bread program. Italian fried rice combines fennel, roasted radish, greens, house-made cotechino, and a poached egg, with Craig’s longtime cotechino recipe in the role typically played by Spam or Chinese sausage. Skate wing Milanese comes topped with a bracing Mayfair dressing-topped cabbage and mint salad.
Desserts include rum-soaked Savarin with jam and macadamia crème diplomat, lemon posset with yogurt chantilly and herb granita. and chocolate-peanut butter mousse cake with espresso crème anglaise.
Ironically, one of Sur Lie’s biggest advantages may be what it doesn’t have: a kitchen on the same level as the dining room. The compact footprint required all prepping and cooking to take place downstairs, keeping the clatter of dishes, clang of pans, and kitchen chatter out of earshot. With no gas line or exhaust hood, Craig relies entirely on induction burners and convection ovens.
“I’m actually looking forward to the limitations,” he previously told SLM. “When we opened Little Fox, I could do anything I wanted. Being limited to what you can do drives creativity.”
The beverage program follows the same philosophy of thoughtful restraint. Little Fox sommelier Beckie Lambson will oversee a list of about 125 bottles from multiple regions, plus sparkling, skin-contact, white, and red by the glass.
With no room for a traditional bar in the space, cocktails will require some ingenuity. There will be four draft cocktails, “freezer door” martinis (pre-batched and held in a freezer), plus a handful of classics shaken to order by the servers. “You won’t see a back bar with myriad liquor bottles,” Craig quips. “There’s no bar at all.”
Notable cocktails include the Sur Lie Martini combines two gins (dry gin and coastal gin), with two vermouths (dry vermouth and Spanish blanc vermouth), Flora Spritz (creme de flora with white wine, soda, and chamberyzette, a French strawberry aperitif), and two bookend quaffs: First Time Caller and Long Time Listener. Another standout is a chartreuse-colored Green Negroni pairing dill-infused gin with Boomsma Cloosterbitter, Suze, and white vermouth, that somehow starts off sweet until the bitter components kick in.
The Backstory
The name Sur Lie comes from a French winemaking technique in which wine is left to age in contact with its spent yeast cells, or lees, after fermentation, rather than being immediately racked into another vessel. Aging sur lie enriches wine with creaminess, complexity, and subtle flavors; it’s a hallmark of certain high-quality white and sparkling wines. The Rivards saw the term as a metaphor for their own evolution.
A St. Louis native, Craig worked his way from dishwasher to the Culinary Institute of America before cooking at New York institutions including Gotham Bar and Grill, Diner, Marlow & Sons, and Clover Club. Mowgli’s career likewise took her through some of Brooklyn’s most influential restaurants—including Diner, where she and Craig met—before returning to his hometown to open Little Fox, now one of St. Louis’ most acclaimed restaurants.
In 2021, The New York Times named Little Fox to its “America’s Favorite Restaurants” list. The next year, Craig received a James Beard Award semifinalist nod for “Best Chef: Midwest.” And just a few months ago, Little Fox was named one of Conde Nast Traveler’s “12 Best Restaurants in St. Louis.”
Sur Lie represents the next chapter for the Rivards. The restaurant will mark the second concept from their hospitality group, Postcards from Brooklyn, with Mowgli serving as its “Concept & Culture Director,” and it will build on the same passions that have defined their work: ingredient-driven cooking, hyper-focused hospitality, and creating restaurants that feel rooted in the neighborhoods they serve. Sur Lie is rooted in European traditions, inspired by time spent at such places as Le Verre Volé in Paris.
For the Rivards, that sense of place extends well beyond the food. “The restaurants that have stayed with us over the years weren’t just about what was on the plate,” Mowgli previously said. “They were places that made people feel comfortable enough to linger, celebrate, connect, and come back again and again. That’s what we hope Sur Lie becomes for Fox Park.”
Sur Lie
📍2805 Shenandoah, Fox Park
⏰4–10 p.m. (last seating at 9:30 p.m.) Tue–Thu; 4–11 p.m. (last seating at 10:30 p.m.) Fri & Sat
Coming soon: Bottle Shop: Noon–4 p.m. Tue–Sun
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