It may be flu season, but it looks like we’ve got a case of (very) bad timing. As you’ll see in our November issue, which hit the streets Monday, Old School columnist Liz O’Connor weighed in with a review of Riddles, the beloved locavore restaurant in University City. We learned today, though, that Riddles is closed until further notice. Didn’t see that one coming.
Owner KT Ayers said in a statement that “circumstances in my life made it impossible to put in the time and effort that it has been taking to pull this restaurant thing off. We tried bringing someone else in, but that really seemed to compromise a lot of the Riddles brand. We are looking at a couple different roads right now, but nothing is in stone.” She added that neither she nor her father will be running Riddles in the near future.
The Riverfront Times’ Ian Froeb reported that “According to Case.net, on October 28, the owner of 6307 Delmar Boulevard, Bobby’s Creole Inc., filed a suit in St. Louis County for “AC Rent and Possession” against A&P Eateries Inc. (Riddle’s) and Katherine (better known as KT) Ayers, the owner of Riddle’s.”
Ayers told Sauce today that:
“The owner of the building is just doing what anyone would do on such short notice. That is, covering her tail in the legal department while simultaneously working closely with me personally to figure a mutually agreeable outcome that will, in fact, keep things out of court. She and I have a good relationship personally, and we are in close contact. But she has to be covered just in case. I have been quite forthcoming with her about my problems for quite some time, and she has been valuable as a sounding board and voice of experience as both a woman business owner and a restauranteur [sic]. … This is just procedure in the super-unlikely event of a worst-case scenario.
“I bit off more than I could chew with the perfect storm of (my) business inexperience, the (shitty) economy, and the big takeoff of Eat Here (rendering my dad too busy to really mentor me like he intended). If I knew three years ago what I know now, I would have taken the same plunge, probably with different results, but my learning curve was no match for the aforementioned factors. That said, I have run the kitchen at Riddles since I was 21, and I don’t think I’m vain to take some of the credit for the kudos we’ve gotten in those 13 years. I can’t wait to be a cook again, and I really don’t mind working for somebody else.”
The long-loved spot is the latest victim in a slew of restaurant closings that have hit the St. Louis area in the last few weeks. Teutenberg’s downtown, Wapango in Chesterfield Mall, Caito’s in Chesterfield, Growlers Pub in Creve Coeur, The Pasta House in the Central West End and Newstead Tower Public House in The Grove have all shuttered in the last few weeks. An American Place, the fine dining establishment in the Renaissance Grande Hotel downtown, is also set to shutter its doors within the next week or so.
This article appears in Nov 1-30, 2010.