On this episode of The Sauce podcast, host Lauren Healey sits down with Drew Jameson, managing partner of Atomic by Jamo in the Grove, for a conversation about bringing one of St. Louis’s most iconic music venues back to life. Drew was a talent buyer at the space (then Atomic Cowboy) from 2015 to 2020, and after the pandemic shut it down, he came back to reopen it under a new name and a new mission: eat, drink, dance, repeat.
Drew walks through everything that’s changed since the Atomic Cowboy days — from the redesigned lounge and its retro color splashes to a dynamic, scalable layout built for flexibility, including fence lines that unlock to double the pavilion’s capacity and shipping-container bars on wheels. He talks about building out Atomic Eats with the King Side Diner team in the kitchen and STL Barkeep behind the bar, and how a rocky first week of dinner service turned into five-star nights within a couple of weeks.
The conversation also traces Drew’s own path through the St. Louis music scene — from playing lead guitar in Acoustics Anonymous (which became The Mighty Pines) to a physical injury that pushed him into promoting, to the pandemic-era pod shows he built next to Busch Stadium that helped keep live music alive in St. Louis when nothing else was happening.
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