St. Louis CITY SC shows off local food options at CITYPARK

CITY plans to have more than two dozen local food and beverage partners, including Balkan Treat Box, BEAST Craft BBQ, Steve's Hot Dogs, Brasserie, and Pastaria Deli & Wine serving fans across 52 areas inside the stadium.

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St. Louis has long been known as a good sports town. Recently, it’s received recognition as a great city for food, too. At the soon-to-open CITYPARK stadium in Downtown West, St. Louis CITY SC is striving to make its new home a place to experience both strengths.

That work started last year when the club appointed Niche Food Group’s Gerard Craft as its flavor officer. Look past the cheeky title and you’ll see that CITY is serious about food. After sifting through more than 10,000 local food recommendations submitted by CITY fans, Craft has recruited an all-star team of local restaurants, including headliners such as Balkan Treat Box, Steve’s Hot Dogs, BEAST Craft BBQ, and two of his own Niche staples, Brasserie and Pastaria Deli & Wine, to provide a culinary experience that goes far beyond standard stadium fare. By the start of the 2023 Major League Soccer season, CITY plans to have at least 25 local food and beverage partners serving fans across 52 stations inside CITYPARK. According to CITY officials, no MLS stadium will have more places to purchase refreshments than the one in St. Louis.

“Gerard Craft and his team, along with Levy, our concessionaire, started working through the list in a very thoughtful and methodical way because we wanted to make sure we represented everything that the region had to offer,” says Carolyn Kindle, CITY’s president and CEO.

Hot dogs and burgers? Check.

St. Louis specialties, such as pork steak? You bet.

International cuisine? Sure thing.

For Craft, it was important to not only hit a variety of culinary categories, but also to identify specific items that would make for good stadium cuisine.

“It’s food that can be made for the masses, that can be held as you walk around, [and] food that goes great with beer,” Craft says. “Soccer is a unique way of serving people. It’s not like baseball where you have every single inning for people to sprint out to get a bite to eat. Soccer, we’re talking about pregame and halftime, and what are we talking about, 20,000 to 23,000 people all coming in twice through a game? There’s got to be a lot of thought.”

Craft, though, has seemingly embraced that challenge, collaborating with CITY officials to find ways to streamline the ordering process. At CITYPARK, which will be a cashless, ticketless venue, guests will be able to order concessions through the team’s mobile app before getting in line. There will also be walk-in, walk-out markets along the concourses to keep people moving.

“This technology that we’ve experienced over the last few years, especially coming out from COVID, these are things that have saved our businesses,” says BEAST’s David Sandusky. “We’ve become very reliant on them. To see them used to benefit everyone is gonna be really cool for the stadium. You don’t see that kind of thing a lot.”

As anticipation builds for CITY’s inaugural MLS season, here’s a glimpse at some of the signature items you’ll be able to order when you step inside CITYPARK next spring:

Brasserie by Niche’s Brass Burger

Pastaria Deli & Wine’s Detroit-style pizzas

With basic toppings like American cheese, dijonnaise, dill pickle, and onion, the Brass Burger is one of the most stadium-ready items from Craft’s stable of restaurants.

“That was kind of an easy one for us,” he says.

Same with Detroit-style pizzas, which are cooked in a square pan and come with a thick crust that is both crispy and chewy. Available styles include margherita and pepperoni.

"Something we've talked with everybody about is keeping menus really simple and focused on their star items," Craft says.

Balkan Treat Box’s Tantuni Kebab

These kebabs, which can be served either as a wrap or in a hoagie-style bread, are loaded with morsels of meat (choose from beef or chicken—or go with the plant-based option) that are complemented by tomato, sumac, onion, herbs, and lemon.

“It has a lot of spice, and it’s salty,” says chef-owner Loryn Nalic. “I think it naturally goes hand-in-hand with beer. It makes you crave beer when you eat it. You can eat it with one hand, and hold a beer in the other.”

Steve’s Hot Dogs’ CITY Dog

The hot dog is the quintessential stadium food. For CITY, nothing felt more fitting than embracing the frank that Steve’s Hot Dogs bills as “the official St. Louis-style Hot Dog.” The all-beef dog is smoked and grilled, and topped with Provolone cheese, grilled onions, green peppers, smokey pepper mustard, banana peppers, and bacon.

“When we first opened the restaurant, we had about seven recipes,” says founder and co-owner Steve Ewing. “I said to my main cook, Joe Zeable, 'Joe, we need to come up with a dog that represents the city.' We were on The Hill at the time, and using as much of the local products as we could. We had the bun from local bakeries. We were using cheese from DiGregorio's Italian Market. Things like that. He came up with a dog that he thought would represent the city.”

And, as it turns out, the dog now represents CITY, too.

BEAST Craft BBQ Co.’s Pork steak sandwich

Ah, the humble pork steak. It’s a St. Louis institution, and a menu staple at David Sandusky’s smokehouse in The Grove. At CITYPARK, the steak will be smoked on hickory, then basted and blasted with a torch to achieve the ultimate in caramelization. 

“It’s the perfect mix of big and sloppy,” Sandusky says. “It’s a two-handed type of sandwich, but it’s not dripping in barbecue sauce, so it’s not difficult to eat. It’s big, but not too messy.”

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