St. Louis Missouri Real Estate

Best New Restaurant
Aya Sofia
It was a comparatively low-key year for new restaurant openings. Whereas the recent past brought marquee debuts (Larry Forgione's An American Place) or neighborhood-regentrifying sizzle (alas, poor JaBoni's, we knew you well), this year's fresh...

Best Restaurant for a First Date
The Boathouse
A first kiss can take your breath away. But that all-over-tingling sensation requires a good first date, and a good first date requires a good venue. Enter the Boathouse in Forest Park. Meet at the Boathouse around 4 p.m.—evening dates are so...

Best Place to Get Fatter
Busch's Grove
They call em fat cats for a reason. The hey-big-spenders who traditionally sup at Busch's Grove—and we do mean traditionally, as this bastion of all things gluttonous has been around since the century before last, aside from a three-year...

Best Restaurant When Someone Else Pays
Monarch
"Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act which should not be indulged in lightly," proclaims Monarch's Web site. To which we would add, "or with your own money." There are competing theories on milking your patron. The first is to...

Best Place to Eat Out Alone
Moxy
Even if you're alone at Moxy, you're not really alone. The teensy bar is so close to the open-air kitchen that you can easily carry on a conversation with the chef while he or she is making your meal. What's more, Moxy stays open throughout the...

Best Place to Eat Out with Grandpa
Mike Shannon's Steaks and Seafood
Poor Grandpa. By the time you pick him up from the Retirement Castle or drag him off the golf course, you and the rest of your family have argued your appetites away deciding where to take him for dinner. Of course, he'll accept whatever you pick,...

Best Power Lunch
The Cedars at St. Raymond's Maronite Cathedral
One high-ranking city official who asked not to be named in print describes the Cedars at St. Raymond's during its weekly lunch (which it has been offering for 39 years) like this: "It's definitely the place to be seen on Wednesdays if you're in...

Best Wine List in a Restaurant
Riddles Penultimate Café & Wine Bar
There are other restaurants that make impressive showings with their wine lists —Tony's, Eleven Eleven Mississippi, Sidney Street Café—but none with the underdog panache of Riddles. Because a place like Riddles just isn't supposed to...

Best Wine Bargain
Charlie Gitto's
The biggest deal about going to Charlie Gitto's is that it isn't. On a Sunday in July, a person can escape the humidity and sunshine and enter a low-lit enclave that's romantic and classy. You're greeted at the door by a suit who looks genuinely...

Best Wine Bar
Copia Urban Winery
We, uh, spent a good deal of time mulling over this category. Our ruminations were extensive, our comments varied. "Hmph," we said, then "ernf" and "thppt." Not expressions of dissatisfaction, mind you, but of inner turmoil. This city is blessed...

Best Cheese Plate
Sasha's Wine Bar and Market
When we learned recently of a friend's lactose intolerance, we responded with an amount of sympathy usually reserved for dengue fever, elephantiasis or an allergic reaction to sunshine. "No milk?" we asked incredulously. "No ice cream?" And then,...

Best Steak House
Citizen Kane's Steak House
Oooooh, they have a rib-eye. Forgot they had a rib-eye. That sounds good. No, wait—what about the New York strip? Hmm. A filet might be nice. But I had a filet at home the other night. I should have come here; they give me bloody when I ask...

Best Seafood Restaurant
St. Louis Fish Market
Start with some oysters and/or sushi, then chill awhile over a cup of chilled shrimp cocktail before venturing into the hot apps: steamed Prince Edward Island mussels, Maryland-style crab cakes with roasted-corn salsa, lobster bisque shot through...

Best Vegetarian Restaurant
Shangri-La Diner
We're gonna live forever; we shall feast like kings. For the rest of our many, many days, we shall indulge in beans, tofu, salmon, whole grains, broccoli, fruit and little else save the occasional baseball-size iced cupcake made with real butter...

Best Soul Food
Sweetie Pie's
Great as it is, the original Sweetie Pie's has always suffered from three things: location, location and location. The trip out to the original shop on West Florissant Avenue in Dellwood can take longer than the meal itself. Owner Robbie...

Best Service in a Restaurant
Eleven Eleven Mississippi
It was New Year's Eve 2003. Four friends with no plans for ringing in 04, other than to do it together, to do it casual, but to do it right. One pipes up about this new place, Eleven Eleven Mississippi, in Lafayette Square. She manages to snag a...

Best Décor
Busch's Grove
Entering the newly refurbished Busch's Grove is like walking through a wardrobe and into Narnia. In the Grove's case, the two-story colonial looks like a farmhouse from Clayton Road, but as you turn into the parking lot, a $10 million heaven is...

Best Outdoor Dining
Terrene
Like so many of us, Terrene lost a few tree branches to the Storms of the Century in July. Thankfully, outdoor dining here remains topnotch. What with the lovely brick pathways and the enticing aroma of the wood stove busily smoking bacon, this...

Best Place for Late-Night Dining
Roxane
Ordering a midnight meal typically goes like this: "Yeah, can I have the number-three with a Sierra Mist? And, uh, a large fry, and a bacon-jalapeño cheeseburger combo?" At Roxane it sounds like this: "We'll start with the Yukon gold potato-leek...

Best Breakfast with a Hangover
Pat's Bar & Grill
Figuring out a way to get over a hangover is like trying to figure out how the great pyramids were built: Everybody's got a theory. Maybe back in the day, after some wine-soaked feast for Ra, ancient Egyptians cheered each other on saying, "I...

Best Sunday Brunch
La Dolce Via
Dunno why, but every time we eat Sunday brunch at La Dolce Via (which is more than a few times a year), we act out the same sequence of events in the same order, á la Groundhog Day. First we drive around looking for a parking spot, marveling at...

Best Breakfast
Chris' Pancakes and Dining
Mexican places give you a basket of tortilla chips. Family-friendly restaurants appease screeching tots with tin pails of popcorn. Bread—that's everywhere. But at Chris' Pancakes and Dining, at any time of the day, you get cookies. Warm, half...

Best Coffeehouse
Coffee Cartel
Ten years in, Coffee Cartel's still so picturesque, so inviting, it looks like something out of a sitcom. The outside patio is airy; the inside seating is spacious. The entertainment offerings are endless—wireless Internet, computer consoles,...

Best Barista
Beth Soeder at Starbucks
It's easy to tell a lot about a barista if you know where she's from; each coffeemaster has a distinctive flavor particular to her land of origin. Beth Soeder's winning personality was grown and processed in the metro area, but she has a...

Best Diner
The Buttery
For so long, we've had so many questions about the Buttery. What kind of a diner name is that? Does anybody actually go in there? And most important, why haven't we gone in there? So we did, and we weren't disappointed. The Buttery boasts one of...

Best Lunch Counter
Jennifer's Pharmacy & Soda Shoppe
What is it about lunch counters that's so dang inspiring? More than any old diner, truck-stop café or other greasy spoon, an old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness lunch counter can make the spirit hum with all of mankind's dizzying benevolence....

Best Bosnian Restaurant
Taft Street Restaurant and Bar
It's Friday night, a few hours past most Midwesterners' suppertime, and Sadik Kukic's cozy Taft Street Restaurant is just beginning to fill with people. Read the posted hours and the diners' presence seems rude—this place is set to close in...

Best Greek Restaurant
Colossus
Doesn't it seem like the Gods of Restaurant Hipness have been all, "Hey, Greek food, why don't you get sexy for us? Howzabout a little fusion-hybrid-tapas-slutty-bo”te tap dance?" To which Colossus would reply, "Hey, Restaurant Gods, why don't you...

Best Mexican Restaurant
Casa Lupita
At first glance, St. Louis might not seem like a repository of topnotch Mexican fare. But look again, and here's what you'll find: Cherokee Street. This strip, just west of Jefferson Avenue, is stuffed like a piñata with Mexican businesses,...

Best Guacamole
Maya Cafe
Cilantro and lemon—these are the two ingredients that make Maya Cafe's guacamole so fine. Just the right amount of each, playing off each other as a zippy duet, the acidic bite of citrus foxtrotting around the soft, round-flavored notes of...

Best Italian Restaurant (Cheap)
Trattoria Branica
"Cheap" is such a crass word, so let's call Trattoria Branica "inexpensive." But let's say it with seductive Italian flair—inexpensioso, perhaps?—and let's talk about just how much fantastically, classically prepared Italian cuisine you...

Best Italian Restaurant (Not Cheap)
Lorenzo's Trattoria
It's rare to find homemade gnocchi in St. Louis. Rarer to find homemade spinach gnocchi. But both can be found on the Hill at the delectable Lorenzo's Trattoria. Small, pillowy and, believe it or not, light, Lorenzo's gnocchi is...perfect. This...

Best Middle Eastern Restaurant
Sameem
Just when you thought the ethnic eats along South Grand couldn't get any more diverse—the place is like an EPCOT food court with parking meters—in comes the Afghani restaurant Sameem. Owner Qayum Mohammad and his family are 100 percent...

Best Tapas
Mirasol
Tapas is a dining concept based in Spain, yet Mirasol serves Latin American food. But the restaurant pulls off this bit of fusion with such panache, it's easy to forget that it's a stretch. Maybe that's because Mirasol's owners had already...

Best Indian Restaurant
India's Rasoi
There's stuff going on in the food at India's Rasoi that Western tongues can barely fathom, frankincense-and-myrrh-type stuff that adds a complexity touching on magic and makes every other area Indian joint in the area—and there are a lot of...

Best Sushi
Cha Yoon
Life is too short to eat subpar sushi. That's what brings us, again and again, to tiny Ch‡ Yoon. The restaurant more than makes up for its postage-stamp space with a larger-than-life menu. Sashimi is fleshy, tender and full of flavor, while...

Best Korean Restaurant
Hangook Kwan (a.k.a. Korea House)
Hangook Kwan looks like the quintessential semifinished basement of the 1980s: spacious, equipped with a wide-screen television, a fish tank, a few photos and an it's-OK-if-you-spill-down-here air. The décor plays an indifferent supporting role to...

Best Chinese Restaurant
House of Wong
The sleek LA-meets-Shanghai interiors of House of Wong's two locations suggest an aesthetic far from the stereotypical Chinese joint of old. As goes the décor, so goes the cuisine as well. It's MSG-free and deliciously fresh. The crisp, green...

Best Dim Sum
Lu Lu Seafood Restaurant
A passion for dim sum is like any great love affair. You plan the next encounter before you're even out the door, you vividly go over each feverish moment, and —this is the hardest part—you learn to say no. To say yes too often is to...

Best Thai Restaurant
Manee Thai
Sometimes the package isn't as nice as its wrapper, but that's far from the case at Manee Thai. Gorgeous gold-beaded tapestries line the walls of the restaurant, and the waitstaff wear lovely elaborate ensembles—yet the food is even more...

Best Vietnamese Restaurant
Banh Mi So #1 — Saigon Gourmet
Banh Mi So #1 began humbly back in 1994, selling its namesake pork-and-pickle-stuffed baguettes from a shrouded storefront on far South Grand. In twelve years it has slowly evolved into—well, a slightly sizier hole-in-the-wall. Owners Lynne...

Best Spring Rolls
Pho Saigon
There are two kinds of spring rolls in St. Louis: the fat kind that look like Asian burritos, which are good and everything, but nowhere near as great as the other kind, the freshly rolled little ones the size of a Twinkie. We like the rolls at...

Best Spinach-Artichoke Dip
Café Balaban
Fairy-tale time: Many years ago, in a land not so far from here, a spinach leaf met an artichoke, and they hit it off. You see, in the vegetable kingdom, size doesn't matter, so although Madame Artichoke was much larger than Sir Spinach, he could...

Best Desserts
Niche
It's a good thing Niche serves its desserts at the end of the meal. Sure, it's customary to do it this way, but if pastry chef Mathew Rice's sultry sweetness came out first, no part of the feast following would be able top the dessert course — not...

Best Chain Restaurant
Steak n Shake
You hear the sizzle first, juices popping so sharply that, for a moment, you don't even notice the other families clamoring for a table, their children squealing for an adult-size milkshake this time, Mommy, please. Sometimes you imagine you can...

Best Restroom in a Restaurant
Baileys' Chocolate Bar
Everybody pees. To take the truism a step further: Everybody pees during a night out at a bar, and a large percentage of the Great Peeing Everybody do so more than once. So it would stand to reason that bar owners—perhaps the keenest...

Best New Restaurant Concept
Destination Dining
Jim and Cathy Hoyle nearly opened a Moroccan restaurant last year. Lucky for St. Louis, they canned that idea. Instead, the couple, formerly of west county, debuted Destination Dining, a radical new restaurant concept—here, or...

Best Restaurant Trend
The prix is fixe
When Niche opened its doors late last year in Benton Park, it carved out an instant niche thanks to its prix-fixe dinner option. While the menu was arranged a la carte, diners were welcome to curate their own three-course meal—appetizer,...

Best Local Chef
Mike Johnson
As we testify to the beyond-impressive run of seductive and successful restaurants Mike Johnson has had a hand in, we must also bid him a farewell of sorts. This spring he debuted his double-whammy concept of side-by-side restaurants in downtown...

Best Restaurant to Die in the Past Year
Caribbean Sun
There's no comprehending the restaurateuring gods. There's no pleasing them and no use questioning them. There's no good reason Caribbean Sun shuttered its doors this summer after all of a year-ish in business. There was nothing bad to be said...