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Noto Italian Restaurant’s thrilling take on southern Italian fare earns it the title of “Best New Restaurant of 2020 and 2021. | MABEL SUEN
[ROUNDUPS]
Best of the Best Our picks for the most thrilling new St. Louis restaurants of the past two years Written by
CHERYL BAEHR
T
his time last December, instead of publishing our annual list of the year’s best new restaurants, we were drowning our tears in pouches of takeout cocktails and writing
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RIVERFRONT TIMES
an obituary for the hospitality industry as we knew it. Twentytwo months into the After Times, we don’t need to rehash how or why we got here — we all know what 2020 did to the restaurant business and why the idea of celebrating new spots in a traditional way just was not in the cards during a time of acute crisis. So we talked about the good and the bad, found ways to seek out joy in an otherwise dark time and fueled ourselves with the hope that brighter days were just around the corner. They were. And they weren’t. As the promise of a return to normal (whatever the hell that means) faded faster from our memories than the term “Hot Vax Summer,” the St. Louis restaurant scene in 2021 found itself able to function near pre-pandemic capacity not because things suddenly got bet-
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ter, but because it got used to the hardship. From sta ng shortages that threatened — and in some cases succeeded — to shutter restaurants, to product shortages and rising food costs, the restaurant industry again found itself dealing with one challenge after the next. That the public proved so eager to return to inperson dining was great, except that public returned to a changed industry and showed restaurant professionals way too often that it was not pleased with the new reality. Yet at some point, we have to meet the dining world where it is at and embrace the real successes that have happened since life as we knew it got turned upside down. In spite of — and in many cases, as an answer to — the seemingly impossible challenges thrown its way, the St.
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Louis restaurant industry has given us so many instances of pure joy over the past two years. Though we could discuss those that happened in 2020 as a footnote, it seems unfair to penalize the great restaurants that opened during that year and simply move on without giving them their moment to shine. In that spirit, this year’s roundup is actually two years in one — the Best New Restaurants of 2020 and 2021, a ranked list of the fifteen best dining establishments to open since January 2020. There are a few caveats to this list. First, in keeping with our traditional Best New Restaurants rules, we are including eateries reviewed or visited in 2020 and 2021, even if they technically opened in 2019. This is true of Little Fox, which opened in December of 2019 and, under
