What’s Changing for Wydown Boulevard Clayton Restaurants

"I'm really concerned about the parking, and I'm really concerned about delivery."

— Karen Fairbank, as quoted by St. Louis Public Radio

Karen Fairbank said that at Clayton's Plan Commission and Architectural Review Board meeting in April 2026, worried out loud about a business that hadn't opened yet. She wasn't fighting it. By her own account she wasn't objecting at all and was genuinely looking forward to it. She just wanted someone to think through where all the cars and delivery trucks were going to go on a block that's already tight.

The business in question is going into the old Starbucks at Hanley Road and Wydown Boulevard, a storefront that's sat dark since 2021, when the chain closed it and a later attempt to reopen as a local franchise fell apart before it started. If you've walked past that corner in the last five years, you already know the space. What you might not know is who's filling it, and that's the part of this story that actually matters if you live nearby.

It's not a new operator moving into Clayton. It's Matt McGuire, who already owns two storefronts a few doors down, opening a third.

Three Wydown storefronts

McGuire's name shows up three times within a couple hundred feet of each other on Wydown, plus once more around the corner on DeMun. Laid out in order, the pattern is hard to miss.

Louie came first, the restaurant that made McGuire's name in Clayton dining. Wright's Tavern followed five years later in the old I Fratellini space, a steakhouse McGuire built with chef Cary McDowell and named after Henry Wright, the architect who laid out the Brentmoor, Brentmoor Park, and Forest Ridge subdivisions on either side of the street. Box Hill Grocer opened next door to Wright's Tavern at the end of 2024. And now Gigi is aiming for an October debut directly across the street, on the corner that's been empty since the Starbucks left.

The clearest connection between the businesses is how Gigi may change the experience of waiting for a table at Wright's Tavern.

A steakhouse with no waiting room

Wright's Tavern seats 36 people at banquette tables, plus four bar seats set aside strictly for walk-ins. Reservations are hard to come by. If you show up without one and the bar seats are taken, there's nowhere to wait. No lobby, no host stand with a bench, nothing. You either come back later or you leave.

McGuire has talked publicly about this gap. Box Hill Grocer, he's said, already helps take some of the pressure off, describing it as letting "some of the gas out of that balloon." But Box Hill Grocer is a prepared-foods market, not a place designed to seat you while you wait for a table across the street. Gigi is.

A cafe named after his mother, designed for walk-ins and waiting diners

McGuire has said Gigi, named for his mother, is meant to be an easier space to walk into than his other restaurants, a no-reservations cafe people can drop into throughout the day, including anyone waiting on a table at Wright's Tavern, which has never had a real waiting area of its own. That's not a marketing line invented after the fact. It's the stated design brief.

The plan approved by Clayton's Plan Commission calls for roughly 2,200 square feet with about 45 seats inside plus patio seating, drawn up by Link Architecture. The daytime side runs as a counter-service coffeehouse serving Coma Coffee and pastries starting around 7 a.m. In the evening it flips into a host-seated space serving St. Louis-style bar pizza and drinks, with a limited number of reservations set aside for people who'd rather book ahead. Michael Petres, a Louie chef with a pizza background, is leading that side of the menu alongside Louie executive chef Sean Turner.

The hours the commission approved run roughly 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 1 a.m., Monday through Saturday. McGuire hasn't ruled out adding Sunday, though as of the April meeting he hadn't committed to it either. During that same meeting, commissioners pushed him to consider it. His answer was candid: he's never worked Sundays himself and wasn't sure he should ask staff to if he wouldn't do it, though he allowed it was probably worth considering for the neighborhood's sake.

What the neighbors actually asked about

The parking and delivery questions Fairbank raised weren't dismissed. They came up directly in the plan commission discussion, and McGuire doesn't currently plan to add dedicated parking, though he's said he's open to revisiting that if it becomes necessary. For a corner that already handles foot traffic from Wright's Tavern, Box Hill Grocer, and whatever spillover comes from a third storefront, that's a fair thing for residents to keep an eye on once Gigi is actually seating people, not just filing permits.

The permit cleared the Plan Commission and Architectural Review Board in April 2026 and moved on to a final City Council vote. Assuming construction and permitting stay on schedule, October remains the target.

Box Hill Grocer's role on the block

Box Hill Grocer deserves its own mention because it's easy to misread. It looks like a corner market, sits next door to a steakhouse, and sells prepared food, but McGuire has been clear that it's not meant to replace a real grocery trip. It's built for the night you don't feel like cooking and don't feel like a full sit-down meal either.

The story behind it goes back further than the storefront. McGuire's grandfather was a neighborhood grocer, and Wydown itself once had its own version of that in a store called Wydown Market that used to sit just down the street. Box Hill Grocer's meat case draws from Creekstone Farm, Blackhawk Farms, the same source behind the ground beef in Wright's Tavern's cheeseburger, and Porter Road, a Nashville-based purveyor. It's a prepared-foods market rather than a full grocery store, and part of the same restaurant group.

What this actually changes for a Wydown evening

If Gigi opens on schedule this October, the practical version of this story is simple. Within about a hundred feet on Wydown Boulevard, you'll have a steakhouse that's kept reservations hard to land since it opened in 2022, a prepared-foods market that already functions as its overflow valve, and a cafe built specifically to catch whoever's still waiting when both of those are full. Reservations at Wright's Tavern likely won't get any easier to land. What changes is what you do while you wait for one, or what you do instead if you'd rather not try.

For neighbors, the remaining question is how that added activity will fit on a block already tight on parking and delivery.

If you're weighing what a corner like this signals about a neighborhood's day-to-day rhythm, or you're simply trying to figure out where to grab dinner near Wydown this fall, Thompson & Richardson spends as much time tracking the texture of Clayton's streets as its real estate. If you'd like to talk through what's happening in the neighborhoods we know best, reach out to request a private home consultation.