There is a voice St. Louisans have likely heard without knowing whose it was. It has moved through the static of late-night radio, bounced off the rafters of college gymnasiums and cut clean through the ambient noise of charity auction rooms. It belongs to Joe Parisi, a marketing director, voice actor, ring announcer and, for the last decade, an unlikely documentary filmmaker with a singular project: finding the stories this city keeps to itself.
His latest film is called “St. Paul, Pray for Us,” a title that sounds like it belongs on a parish wall, and it is about a sandwich. Specifically, it is about the St. Paul sandwich. If you grew up in certain parts of this city, you already know what that means: an egg foo young patty on white bread slathered in mayonnaise. If you didn’t, the fact that you’re only hearing about it now is, in itself, the story.
“What struck me,” Parisi said, “was that it was this St. Louis-specific thing but most of St. Louis doesn’t even know about it.”
That gap, between a thing’s significance and its public invisibility, is where Parisi does his best work. He describes himself as drawn to “pop culture oddities,” things that were once embedded in daily life but have since slipped beneath the surface of collective memory. The St. Paul sandwich is one of those things.
The origin story most commonly attached to the sandwich credits Stephen Yuen with its invention, and on that Parisi agrees. The decade, however, was wrong. Yuen created the sandwich in 1974 at Park Chop Suey in Lafayette Square, not the 1940s as was erroneously reported and repeated for years, and the proof was still showing up to work: a man Yuen hired in the years that followed, who stood beside him in that kitchen for decades and never left. The original building is now a boutique pet supply store. Park Chop Suey moved down the street and kept going. It is a small act of historical correction. But the film is interested in something larger than the sandwich’s birth certificate.
To spend time in the neighborhoods where the St. Paul sandwich resides is to understand something about how a city distributes its resources and its attention. Today, Park Chop Suey sits at 1321 Chouteau Ave., a single address that manages to border both Lafayette Square, one of the city’s most sought-after historic neighborhoods, and Peabody Darst Webbe, where decades of concentrated poverty and disinvestment have left marks that a change of address cannot fix.
Parisi describes arriving at these restaurants at 11:30 on a Tuesday morning and finding the vestibules packed shoulder to shoulder, customers waiting 45 minutes for their orders. “I was blown away by how much business those chop suey restaurants are doing,” he said. The clientele, he noticed, arrived largely on foot. No cars. No other options, or very few. These shops are not novelties. They are, in the most functional sense, community infrastructure.
What Parisi encountered in the communities surrounding them was something he did not expect to need a word for until he found himself searching for one. Some residents lit up when he approached with his camera, eager to claim the sandwich as their own. Others wanted nothing to do with him. Parisi didn’t take it personally. “They didn’t want to see their neighborhood exploited,” he said. He turned the observation over for a moment before finding the word that fit: guardianship. It is the instinct of a community that has been made, over a long time, to think carefully about what it can afford to lose.
But the word holds. These are communities that have watched resources leave, watched options narrow, watched the slow geography of disinvestment draw its borders around them, and they have learned to protect what remains. The chop suey restaurants are oases. In these food deserts the chop suey shops are in many cases what stands between a neighborhood and having nothing and the ecology of a community that is starved for options cannot survive losing one more.
Parisi’s film does not editorialize about any of this. It doesn’t need to. He arrived with a camera and a question about a sandwich, and the neighborhoods answered with something else entirely: a portrait of what it looks like when people decide, without ceremony or credit, to hold something together. There is something instructive in that, in the idea that curiosity aimed at the right things is its own kind of care. So go. Find one of these places, order a St. Paul, and pile on the mayonnaise. Parisi is insistent on that point, and he has done the research. It is a small act and an uncomplicated one, which is sometimes exactly what a city needs from you.
“St. Paul, Pray for Us” is available now at JoeParisiFilms.com.