Walk west on DeMun Avenue after the dinner rush starts and the block does most of the work for you. Kaldi's is still pulling shots at 700, the lights are on at Louie two doors down, and there is usually a short line outside Clementine's before anyone official has thought about closing for the night. It reads like a strip that figured itself out years ago and stopped fussing with the formula. That is mostly true. Except for one corner.
The address at 740 DeMun has spent the better part of fifteen years being the block's one restless spot, cycling through three different restaurant identities while everything around it stayed exactly where it was. That contrast, more than any single opening or closing, is the real story of what this short stretch of Clayton has become.
Three Decades at 700 DeMun
Kaldi's Coffee Roasting Co. opened its first café at 700 DeMun Avenue in 1994. The location has run continuously since, long enough that by 2019 the company was already pouring a special 25th anniversary blend to mark it. That puts the shop at more than three decades on the same corner today, longer than most of the people ordering a cold brew there have been alive. Kaldi's has grown into a regional roaster with cafés across Missouri, but the DeMun location is still the one that started it, sitting across DeMun Avenue from Concordia Seminary's park grounds, which gives the block its quiet, tree-lined feel.
For a neighborhood that tends to get talked about in terms of what just opened, that kind of continuity is worth naming directly. The coffee shop that anchors DeMun's morning routine predates almost every other business on the street by a wide margin, and there is nothing in its history to suggest that changes.
Sasha's and Louie, Building the Long Middle
A few doors down, the same short building at 706 DeMun Avenue holds both Sasha's Wine Bar and Louie, one of Clayton's more interesting pairings of old and newer. Sasha's has poured wine flights and cheese boards there long enough that one regular, describing the bar back in 2019, said he met his wife on the patio sixteen years earlier, which puts the bar's roots at least as far back as the early 2000s. That is more than twenty years on one address by now, including a rooftop patio expansion the Clayton Board of Aldermen approved in 2019 to add roughly 800 square feet of additional seating above the original bar.
Louie followed not long after, when chef Matt McGuire, previously of Niche Food Group and his earlier restaurant King Louie's, opened an Italian-inspired neighborhood spot built around a wood-burning pizza oven shipped in from Italy, with room for about 70 seats between the bar and dining room. By 2019, one longtime restaurant owner describing the DeMun strip said Louie "feels like it's been there forever," even though it was still the newest addition to the block at the time. It has run under the same ownership and concept ever since, without the menu overhaul or rebrand that has hit other addresses nearby. Between Sasha's and Louie, that one building has carried two distinct restaurant identities for close to two decades, and neither one has needed to reinvent itself to stay full.
Clementine's Naughty & Nice Creamery, established in 2017 at 730 DeMun, rounds out the block's steady core. Nine years in, it is still building a reputation for rotating small-batch flavors, and reviews updated as recently as August 2026 still describe a line forming most warm evenings.
Here is what that steadiness looks like laid out by address:
| Address | Business | Open Since | Approx. Years Running |
|---|---|---|---|
| 700 DeMun Ave | Kaldi's Coffee Roasting Co. | 1994 | 32 |
| 706 DeMun Ave | Sasha's Wine Bar | early 2000s | 20+ |
| 706 DeMun Ave | Louie | late 2010s | ~10 |
| 730 DeMun Ave | Clementine's Naughty & Nice Creamery | 2017 | 9 |
The Corner That Can't Sit Still
Then there is 740 DeMun.
The address opened as DeMun Oyster Bar in 2011, built around day-boat seafood flown in from both coasts, and it earned a reputation strong enough that St. Louis Magazine once called it "the pearl of the neighborhood." Eight years in, according to the restaurant's own account at the time, the cost of flying in small daily orders of oysters caught up with the concept. In April 2018 the space closed and reopened about a week later as Barrio, a menu of Mexican, Latin American, and Spanish dishes built partly out of a side project called Backdoor Burritos that the Oyster Bar had run during its Saturday farmers market stint.
Barrio's first run lasted sixteen months. By August 2019 it had stopped day-to-day service, and the corner sat open for private events while its owner, Alan Richman, who also owns Sasha's, decided what to do with what one write-up at the time called "the prime corner real estate." That December, Richman ran a short wine-focused pop-up called Du Jour out of the empty space, pouring bottles from Sasha's own cellar. By the following summer, in 2020, Barrio had come back a second time, reworked around cheeseburgers, fries, and root beer floats. That version is still running today, listed directly on Sasha's own site as its sister concept next door.
A quick timeline of one address, 2011 to today:
- 2011: DeMun Oyster Bar opens, becomes known for daily-flown oysters
- 2018: Rebrands to Barrio, a Mexican and Latin American menu
- 2019: Barrio closes after sixteen months, sits vacant
- Late 2019: Sasha's owner runs a temporary wine pop-up in the space
- 2020: Reopens a second time as Barrio, now a burger and float format
- 2026: Still operating under Sasha's ownership
Three different restaurant concepts at one address, inside fifteen years. Forty numbers down the same block, the coffee shop at 700 DeMun kept its name and its owner for thirty two.
Why the Contrast Is the Point
None of this makes DeMun a shaky stretch of street. If anything, it argues the opposite. A block that can absorb three concept changes at a single address without ever losing its identity is a block with real demand underneath it, steady enough that one operator can experiment on the same corner for a decade and a half and know the rest of the street will hold. Kaldi's, Sasha's, Louie, and Clementine's are not surviving despite the turnover two doors down. They are the reason the turnover at 740 has never mattered much to how the block feels.
If you already spend time on DeMun, none of this is probably news so much as it is confirmation of something you already sensed without being able to point to exactly where it came from. The block reads as settled because most of it genuinely is. The one address that keeps reinventing itself is doing so because the corner can support it, not because the street is struggling to hold onto anything.
That kind of staying power, the sort that shows up in who has kept the lights on at the same address for two or three decades rather than in anyone's marketing copy, says something real about a neighborhood's underlying pull. If you are curious what a block like DeMun's tells you about home values in that corner of Clayton, or you are thinking through how a street's long-term stability should factor into a future sale, Thompson & Richardson can walk through the specifics with you. Request a Private Home Consultation to talk through your corner of Clayton in more detail.
