What's New to Eat in Downtown Kirkwood Right Now

Lona Luo almost opened her second restaurant in Los Angeles. Kevin and Luke Beattie could have put their gourmet market in any storefront with good bones and cheap rent. Instead, all three of them ended up on the same three blocks of downtown Kirkwood this summer, and none of it was an accident.

If you have walked down Argonne or Woodbine in the past month, you already know something changed. What you might not know is why these particular people, with these particular options, chose here.

The Butcher Shop in the 1875 Building

Fox's Finest Meats, Seafood & Marketplace opened its doors on July 22 with a 10 a.m. ribbon cutting at 159 W. Argonne, right at the corner of Argonne and Clay. The building it occupies was Kirkwood's original neighborhood grocery store, built in 1875. Kevin and Luke Beattie, the father-and-son team behind it, didn't stumble into that history. They went looking for it.

Both Beatties grew up in Kirkwood and graduated from Kirkwood High School. They share the middle name Fox, a family name passed down for generations, which is where the shop gets its own. Kevin says the building's roots as a general store were part of the draw from the start, and that reviving a piece of that legacy while keeping the food accessible across price points mattered as much as the location itself.

The space is built for people who actually cook. Inside its roughly 2,200 square feet up front, with another 1,300 in back, you'll find:

• A U-shaped service counter anchored by a 12-foot meat case, a separate seafood case, and dedicated pork and poultry displays
• An 8-foot butcher block order counter next to the prepared foods and rotisserie
• A wine nook in the back, framed with reclaimed century-old wood and a mural of vineyard hills
• Rafters and shelving built from wood salvaged from the Lemp Mansion

That wine nook has its own small local story attached. Some of the bottles come from Blindspot Vineyard, a label started by a Kirkwood family who bought a winery in Italy after meeting its former owners at the Kirkwood Wine Walk, the neighborhood's own walking wine tasting event. It's the kind of connection that only happens when the person stocking the shelves and the person making the wine already move in the same small circle.

Kevin has compared the role of the staff at the counter to Sam Malone greeting regulars at Cheers, which sounds like a stretch until you realize the Beatties hired two chefs and two onsite butchers specifically to build that kind of relationship with customers, not just to process orders. They also brought in students from a Kirkwood High School marketing class, the same class Luke once took himself, to help shape the shop's branding before it opened.

The Restaurant That Picked Kirkwood Over Los Angeles

Lona's Lil Eats held its grand opening for its second location on Saturday, August 15, with a rice-paper ribbon cutting at 4 p.m. at 612 W. Woodbine Ave, a block from the St. Louis Community College–Meramec campus. The building was formerly home to 612 Kitchen & Cocktails and Graham's Grill.

Getting here took a detour. Chef-owner Lona Luo and her husband and business partner Pierce Powers III had actually been eyeing Los Angeles for their second location before the pandemic put that plan on indefinite hold. When they picked it back up, nothing felt right until this building in Kirkwood did.

That's worth sitting with for a second. This isn't a restaurant hunting for its first foothold. Luo's story started at a Soulard Farmers Market stall in 2008, grew into a brick-and-mortar in Fox Park by 2014, and has since collected three consecutive James Beard Award semifinalist nods for Luo as Best Chef: Midwest, from 2018 through 2020. A restaurant with that kind of national attention had a real option on the coast. It chose a St. Louis suburb instead.

The Kirkwood menu mirrors the Fox Park original down to the giant rice paper wraps, handmade dumplings, stir-fried glass noodles, village bamboo stew, and pineapple-coconut cookies. The team behind the counter includes Luo's cousin Nick Powers running operations and chef Phil Kurrus leading the kitchen. Even the décor carries a family thread: the couple's daughter, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Jane Powers, helped shape the homelike look of the space, and Luo's framed James Beard semifinalist honors hang on the wall alongside embroidered textiles made by hand.

Luo has said her approach to pricing comes from a simple belief that good food shouldn't be reserved for people who can already afford it easily. That philosophy traveled from a farmers market stall to a nationally recognized restaurant without changing, and now it's traveling to Kirkwood too.

What the BBQ Counter at Schnucks Says About Turnover

Not every new name downtown is brand new. Tender Love BBQ has been running its counter inside the Schnucks Kirkwood food hall on Manchester for close to a year now, joining Seoul Taco and One Two Three Sushi as tenants. Brian and Samada Randels had already been operating TLBBQ as a catering business since 2023 before they got a permanent counter, and that sequencing matters more than it might seem.

That particular slot in the food hall has seen real churn. The Shaved Duck occupied it before, and after that came Oh Hey! Barbecue, an offshoot of Salt + Smoke, which closed in October 2023. Two barbecue concepts came and went in that same footprint before Tender Love BBQ moved in, and the difference this time is that the operators had already spent years building a following in the area through catering before they ever signed a lease.

If a food hall slot with a track record of turnover has finally found something that's sticking, the reason isn't a flashier concept. It's that the people running it were already known here.

The Common Thread

Line these three up and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with square footage or menu category. Fox's Finest is a historic-building butcher shop and market. Lona's Lil Eats is a nationally recognized restaurant that seriously considered a coastal expansion instead. Tender Love BBQ is a food hall counter in a slot that has chewed through concepts before. None of them share a format, a price point, or a cuisine.

What they share is that every one of them was already local before they became new. Kevin and Luke Beattie grew up here and went to high school two blocks from where their shop now stands. Lona Luo and Pierce Powers built their reputation in St. Louis for over a decade before choosing Kirkwood over Los Angeles. Brian and Samada Randels had already been feeding this area through catering for years before the food hall counter existed.

That's a different story than the usual one about a neighborhood's food scene expanding. It's not that downtown Kirkwood is suddenly attractive to outside operators looking for a new market to test. It's that the people already embedded in this community are the ones deciding to put down permanent, storefront-level roots here, at the same time, within a few blocks of each other. If you're wondering what opens next, that's probably where to look first: not at who's expanding into Kirkwood, but at who around you already hasn't left.

If you want more of what's actually happening in Kirkwood before it shows up anywhere else, from the openings to the small stories behind them, get in touch with Melinda Becker. We're in these neighborhoods often enough to know the difference between a headline and a pattern.