Longtime South Grand restaurant and catering company Giuseppe’s reopens in Fenton
Giuseppe’s, a beloved Italian restaurant that made its name on South Grand in the 1970s, has reopened at 972 S. Highway Drive in Fenton.
“The food is exactly the same, just in more of a fast-casual kind of setup,” said owner Eric Stockmann. “Everything’s quick, freshly made and healthy. We’ve taken all of the old recipes that we’ve been using at South Grand down here to do a quick-serve, fresh lunch.”
Rose’s, once a prominent Italian restaurant in downtown St. Louis that opened in the 1920s, passed its recipes on to its chef Giuseppe Pugliese and his wife Antonia Pugliese when it shuttered in the mid-1970s, according to Stockmann. The couple opened their restaurant, Guiseppe’s, shortly after.
Over the years, however, diminishing foot traffic, coupled with a two-year closure of U.S. Hwy. 40 (now I-64) in the late 2000s, left Giuseppe’s as a “destination restaurant,” Stockmann said. “There were a lot of West County diners that would come into the city but, without that main pipeline, business slowed.”
In 2014, the restaurant moved to only catering, which still makes up a significant portion of the business.
“We had such a huge following for such a long time,” he said. “Now just trying to get it to work back out has been our push. We’d been getting phone calls about when we were going to reopen.”
Stockmann said he chose the location in Fenton because it’s in a densely populated business district, as well as for its proximity to several highways, which had bolstered its former dining business on South Grand.
[Giuseppe’s] is just such a unique place; it’s got so much tradition with some of the specialty items,” he said, such as the homemade red sauce and meatballs, along with pan-fried chicken livers and breaded beef spiedini. “We’re just trying to bring the great tradition of what we had down there [in St. Louis] into Fenton.”
Giuseppe’s is open from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday.
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