For decades, BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups functioned as a kind of spiritual front porch for South Broadway, a venerable institution where the walls sweated blues history, the floors rattled beneath brass bands and generations of St. Louis musicians carved their names into the city’s cultural memory. When the venue shuttered in 2023, it left behind more than a vacant building. It created a void in downtown St. Louis itself.
Now, in one of the biggest cultural revival stories the city has seen in years, BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups is officially returning to 700 S. Broadway under new ownership, signaling a major reinvestment in a corridor long synonymous with live music, nightlife and St. Louis identity.
The club is now under contract to Steve Sullivan and Mark Goldenberg, owners of nearby Broadway Oyster Bar, who say the goal is not simply to reopen a music venue, but to restore a landmark woven directly into the city’s cultural DNA.
“BB’s has always been more than a club. It’s a living piece of St. Louis history,” Sullivan and Goldenberg said in a joint statement. “We’re re-opening not just to bring back live music, but to preserve a space where culture, community and creativity have always thrived and bring it forward to a new era in St. Louis.”
The announcement arrives at a pivotal moment for the city’s music community. The loss of BB’s in 2023 already marked the end of an era for South Broadway’s historic “Blues Triangle,” but the abrupt closure of the St. Louis Blues Museum earlier this year only deepened concerns about the erosion of spaces dedicated to preserving the city’s musical legacy. The reopening of BB’s now positions the venue as both a comeback story and a cultural preservation effort.
A public pre-opening celebration is scheduled for Wednesday, May 20, at noon and will feature performances from The Funky Butt Brass Band and acclaimed St. Louis blues artist Marquise Knox, with local officials expected to attend. Sullivan and Knox will offer remarks, and guests will receive previews of the club’s revamped food menu.
That menu leans heavily into Memphis and Southern soul influences, pairing live music with dishes like smoked crab and pimento dip, dry-rub smoked crayfish with spiced butter, brisket pasta with collard greens and black-eyed peas, a Memphis burger piled with pulled pork and barbecue sauce, smoked duck fried rice, fried chicken with cornbread and deep-fried pecan pie finished with bourbon caramel.
The culinary direction mirrors the broader vision for BB’s: preserving the spirit of traditional American blues and jazz culture while pushing the venue into a new era. Ownership describes the club as both a performance venue and a “living monument” to St. Louis music history, with ambitions that stretch beyond nightly concerts. Plans include educational programming and opportunities for younger audiences to engage with the city’s blues and jazz traditions through storytelling and live performance.
Few buildings in St. Louis carry that kind of layered history quite like BB’s. Constructed in the mid-1800s in what was then Frenchtown, the structure has served over the decades as a boarding house, mercantile, reception hall and millinery before evolving into a music institution when Mark O’Shaughnessy opened BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups there in 1976.
Rather than modernizing the weathered interior, O’Shaughnessy leaned into its creaking floors, narrow rooms and intimate balcony-lined layout, creating a room that felt less like a polished club and more like a living time capsule. Over time, the venue became a defining stage for blues, jazz, soul and R&B in St. Louis, hosting artists including Henry Townsend, Roosevelt Sykes, Albert King, Oliver Sain, Johnnie Johnson, Tommy Bankhead, Big George Brock, Kim Massie and Knox. The walls eventually filled with decades of photographs and memorabilia, transforming the building into an unofficial archive of local music history.
The revival also further solidifies the influence of Broadway Oyster Bar on South Broadway’s entertainment landscape. Since purchasing the Cajun music institution in 2019, Sullivan and Goldenberg, alongside executive chef and ownership partner Michael Trares, have continued expanding its role as one of the city’s premier live music destinations. Like BB’s, the Oyster Bar occupies a mid-1800s structure steeped in local lore, surviving waves of demolition tied to the construction of Busch Stadium, Interstate 55 and the Poplar Street Bridge.
Together, the neighboring venues could once again transform this stretch of Broadway into one of the city’s most vital cultural corridors, a place where blues riffs spill onto the sidewalk, brass bands echo off brick facades and St. Louis’ musical lineage remains fiercely alive rather than preserved behind glass.
