New Restaurants in Des Peres: What's Changing

The building at 1090 Ballas Road spent years as a Jimmy John's. Drive-thru window, standard sandwich-shop footprint, the kind of space you'd drive past without registering. This year it's being converted into a Toastique, a fast-casual spot built around avocado toast, smoothie bowls, and collagen lattes. A few minutes away on Manchester Road, the old branch office of First Community Credit Union is turning into a Cava, the Mediterranean chain's first St. Louis-area location.

Neither of these is a new building. Both are old commercial shells getting a different kind of tenant, and that detail matters more than it looks. Des Peres isn't adding restaurant square footage this year so much as converting the square footage it already has. The city's most active food corridor right now, the stretch running along Manchester and Ballas near Colonnade Center, is being rebuilt inside spaces that used to do something else entirely: a sandwich chain, a bank, a rib joint.

What Got Approved, and Where

In April, the Des Peres Board of Aldermen approved permits for four new restaurants in a single meeting, according to the Webster-Kirkwood Times. That's not four separate businesses each independently discovering Des Peres. That's a cluster, approved together, on the same night:

• Toastique at 1090 Ballas Road, in the former Jimmy John's space. Owner Aija Haizel comes from a health care background and built the menu around organic, nutrient-focused food.
• Cava at 12340 Manchester Road, in the former First Community Credit Union branch office. This is the Mediterranean chain's first St. Louis-area location.
• Sourdough & Company, owned by the Mitchell Family Group, offering sourdough sandwiches, bowls, and wraps built around house dips like harissa and tzatziki.
• A fourth permit rounding out the same meeting's approvals.

Four permits landing on one agenda tells you something a single restaurant opening never could. The city isn't reacting to isolated demand. It's approving a pattern that's already been tested a few hundred yards away.

The Colonnade Center Test Run

That pattern started at Colonnade Center, the retail strip two blocks east of West County Center, across from Des Peres City Hall. Rib City used to occupy 1181 Colonnade Center. It's now Casa de Tres Reyes, a Mexican concept from the same owner who runs Three Kings elsewhere in Des Peres. The public permit filing for that conversion, on file with the city, shows the operator agreeing to a 10-year lease and describing plans to open up the back room and close off the old kitchen entrance from the dining room, cosmetic work layered onto an existing shell rather than new construction. With more than 180 Yelp reviews logged since, the concept has had real time to prove the reuse works, not just survive an opening month.

A few doors down, Taziki's Mediterranean Cafe opened in spring 2025 at 1187-93 Colonnade Center. It wasn't the chain's first Missouri location. That distinction belongs to a Creve Coeur restaurant that opened the year before. Des Peres got the second one, and according to KSDK's St. Louis Business Journal coverage, that expansion decision came after the first location had already established the format in the metro. Des Peres wasn't the experiment. It was the confirmation.

Read against each other, these two openings explain why the April permits look the way they do. Casa de Tres Reyes proved a converted lease at Colonnade Center could work long-term. Taziki's proved a second-wave chain expansion would follow. The Ballas Road and Manchester Road permits are the same logic applied one ring further out from the mall.

The One That Doesn't Fit the Pattern

Porano breaks the mold slightly, and the break is informative. The fast-casual pasta concept from chef Gerard Craft's Niche Food Group opened in Des Peres in August 2024 at 13323 Manchester Road, according to Feast Magazine's coverage of the opening. Porano had already existed once before, as a downtown St. Louis restaurant that ran for two years starting in 2016. It closed. Six years later, Craft brought it back, and Feast Magazine reported his explanation for choosing Des Peres:

"We had struggled with a lot of things [at the Downtown location], and with parking especially."

That's not a restaurant chasing rooftops or demographic data. That's a chef solving a parking problem by relocating to a county suburb with ample lots, positioned near existing draws like Tiger Soup Dumplings and Rosalita's Cantina. Porano's return isn't evidence of a citywide dining boom. It's evidence that a specific, former downtown concept found its second life by trading urban density for suburban convenience, a different calculation than the chains filling former bank branches and sandwich shops.

What the Mall Isn't Doing

It's worth separating this restaurant activity from West County Center itself. The mall has updated its interior in recent seasons and continues to anchor daytime foot traffic in Des Peres, but the restaurant growth described above isn't happening inside it. It's happening around it, in strip retail and freestanding buildings along the roads that feed the mall's parking lots. The distinction matters if you're trying to picture where the actual food changes are landing. It's not a new food court tenant. It's the corridor.

The Constant Underneath the Churn

Not everything in Des Peres is being renegotiated lease by lease. The city's summer concert series at Des Peres Park runs on a schedule that hasn't needed reinventing: free shows on the second Friday of June, July, and August, at the park's 12325 Manchester Road location, backed by the same sponsors year over year, Central Bank, Waste Connections, and Edward Jones, according to the city's own event page. Scouts sell concessions. Ridesharing is encouraged because parking inside the park is limited, with overflow directed to the Edward Jones building lot up the road.

That contrast is the actual story here. The restaurant corridor along Manchester and Ballas is in constant renegotiation, chains testing leases, concepts closing and returning, permits approved in clusters. The park's summer program doesn't behave that way at all. It's the same three Fridays, the same sponsors, the same overflow lot, year after year. Des Peres residents get both versions of the city at once: a food scene that's actively being rebuilt storefront by storefront, and a public gathering spot that's stayed exactly the same shape long enough that nobody has to think about it.

If you're mapping out where to eat this month, that's the piece worth knowing. The new names, Toastique, Cava, Sourdough & Company, are landing in buildings that used to be something else, following a pattern Casa de Tres Reyes and Taziki's already tested at Colonnade Center. Porano is a different animal entirely, a chef's return to a concept that needed suburban parking, not suburban demand. And whatever happens next along Manchester Road, the park's second Friday in August will still be exactly where it's always been.

Jill Azar and Jacque Mileusnic work with buyers and sellers across Des Peres and the surrounding St. Louis communities. If you're curious what a specific Des Peres address is worth in today's market, Jill & Jacque offer a free, no-pressure home valuation to get you started.