In our April cover story, senior staff writer Ligaya Figueras spoke with 11 visionaries who have altered St. Louis’ culinary scene. They told us their experience in their own words. And all month long, we’ve been revealing the parts of the interviews with these men and women that you didn’t see right here in Extra Sauce. First we brought you more from Joe Edwards, then it was Karen Duffy, Patrick Horine, Pat Shannon-VanMatre and Suchin Prapaisilp. And now, we bring you more from Game Changer J.W. “Trip” Straub III, president and CEO of Straub’s. We focused for many years on giving local manufacturers a place to sell. Whether they are local producers or farmers, … almost without fail, somebody that’s local and their product lines up quality-wise, we will take it and give it a shot.
Four years ago, the city of Clayton came to us and said, “The farmers’ market that has been running during the summers – we want to change the format. Would you be interested in taking it over?” We said, “Absolutely.” We run the Clayton Farmers’ Market off of our parking lot from mid-May through the end of October. It’s Saturday mornings, 8:30 to noon. We own the business. It is separate and distinct from Straub’s. We operate it not to make money but to provide community service both for the consumers as well as an outlet for the farmers. We’ve held pretty close to the mission of it being a grower-only market. We try hard not to make it a bazaar or a craft show.
First, [people] picture high price. Shortly after high price, they are going to say, “Great-tasting food.” They are going to say “chicken salad” or “When I buy steaks, I only go to Straub’s.” Because it’s USDA Prime beef, the highest grade of beef you can buy.
We will always carry Prime. It gets increasingly harder to obtain Prime beef. Other stores carry USDA Choice. We started carrying some USDA Choice beef. Other stores also carry USDA Select. We will not carry USDA Select. You can cut it to where it looks very nice in your case, but the end-user is going to be able to taste the difference and that’s not something we want to be associated with. I encourage people to ask the butchers at other stores, “What grade of beef is this?” That’s one thing we found at Ellisville, people didn’t know that difference between USDA Prime and USDA Choice. Shame on us for not teaching them. We took a lot for granted.
This article appears in April 2011.