When news broke in 2015 that a Ranch dressing-themed restaurant would open in Soulard, St. Louis residents weren’t the only ones to take note. National food publication Eater picked up the news from SLM‘s initial story and dubbed the opening of Twisted Ranch “the most St. Louis move ever.”
The restaurant was conceived by co-owners Jim Hayden and Chad Allen, who mulled over restaurant concepts before landing on the so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of a menu heavily influenced by different varieties of the popular dressing and ways it can be slathered, dipped, scooped, rubbed, or infused. Some naysayers assumed the novelty would wear off, but business grew steadily.
Find the best food in St. Louis
Subscribe to the St. Louis Dining In and Dining Out newsletters to stay up-to-date on the local restaurant and culinary scene.
Then earlier this year, as Hayden describes it, “all hell broke loose” after Buzzfeed featured Twisted Ranch in a one-minute video that quickly went viral. At press time, it had racked up 29 million views and nearly 400,000 shares since going live March 22.
“Wait time increased to three hours,” Hayden said. “On Saturday, the wait was two hours right after the doors opened. People had seen the video and for some reason thought Twisted Ranch was a big restaurant. It isn’t. We seat 45.
“We thought that number seats might be enough. Fortunately we were wrong,” Hayden says now.
Once he and Allen saw the concept was viable, they began looking for a larger location. They found it in their own back yard (literally), at Soulard’s Restaurant & Bar, located one block to the east. The longtime restaurant suffered a kitchen fire in March and never reopened. Hayden speculates that its size, location, and visibility could prove to be “the model location to advance the concept. Our idea is to make that one work, then replicate it.”
The new space has triple the seating (including the upstairs and patio) and four times the kitchen space, allowing for expansion of both the menu and hours. “We closed in the afternoon, so we could go shopping for product for that evening’s shift,” he says. “That’s how little prep and storage space we had. Now we can remain open without any lapses in service.”
The partners are working in tandem with the owner of the shuttered Soulard’s Restaurant & Bar to renovate the space, which Hayden says should be ready in early 2018.
He’s also getting inquiries about franchising, “at least 10 since the word got out about the move,” he says. “I tell them to hang tight—we’re still refining the concept.”
