Tonight on Chouteau Avenue, Chao Baan serves its last plates. After seven years of khao tod nam sod and regional Thai cooking that most St. Louis diners had never tried before, the restaurant closes its doors following dinner service. A few blocks away on Manchester, a different kind of night is unfolding. Baia Ristorante already has its lights on. Damn Fine Anytime is fitting out a storefront for its first morning rush. The changes extend beyond the dining scene.
If you live in the Grove and you're only watching the headlines, this looks like a neighborhood in flux, one story trading places for another. But look at why each business is actually leaving, and a different pattern shows up. Neither closure making news this week is about whether the Grove works. Both are about what the owners decided to do with businesses that already work fine.
What Actually Closed, and Why
Chao Baan opened in June 2019 on the ground floor of the Chroma development at 4087 Chouteau, and owner Shayn Prapaisilp built it around food his parents grew up eating: dishes from his mother Sue's home region of Loei in northeastern Thailand and his father Suchin's home region of Yala in the south. The name means "of the people" in Thai. Over seven years it became known for pushing past the pad thai and green curry most St. Louis diners expected from a Thai menu, and its annual Dumpling Dinner, a charity event benefiting the Asian American Chamber of Commerce of St. Louis and the Very Asian Foundation, sold out in under 24 hours every year since it started in 2022.
None of that reads like a business running out of customers. As Yahoo News reported, Prapaisilp said the closure comes down to where his attention has gone.
"I've found myself drawn more and more to the grocery side of our business. That is still one of my dad's great passions: finding foods from around the world and making them available here."
The Prapaisilp family didn't leave the restaurant industry. Suchin opened King & I, the city's first Thai restaurant, back in 1981, and the family still runs it in Richmond Heights along with Oishi Sushi in Creve Coeur and Oishi Sushi & Steakhouse in Chesterfield. What's pulling Shayn now is Global Foods Market in Kirkwood, which the family opened in 1999, and United Provisions in the Delmar Loop, opened in 2014. Chao Baan is closing because one part of a decades-old family business is getting more of the family's time, not because the Grove stopped supporting it.
Grace Meat + Three left the Grove for a similar reason. After nine years on Manchester, the fried chicken spot consolidated its restaurant, catering, and food truck operations into its Grace Chicken + Fish location in Crestwood when its Grove lease expired. A lease ending and a business owner reallocating focus are ordinary parts of running a restaurant. Neither has much to say about foot traffic on Manchester Avenue.
The Businesses Betting on the Same Blocks
What's opening in the Grove right now tells a more useful story than what's closing, because almost none of it is a first-time entrepreneur testing an idea. It's proven operators putting a second, third, or fifth location on the same half mile of Manchester.
- Baia Ristorante is the fifth restaurant from Jordan Goodman, landing at the corner of Manchester and South Boyle.
- Damn Fine Anytime is a second location for Madeline Hissong and Gene Baily, who already run Damn Fine Handpies in Shaw. They're taking over the former Vincent Van Doughnut space at Tower Grove Avenue and Manchester and building out expanded production space alongside a breakfast and lunch counter.
- Fiddlehead Fern opened a second location in the former Songbird space on Chouteau.
- Oni brought in staff from the now-closed Blue Ocean in the Delmar Loop, taking over the old Tempus spot on Manchester.
- Good Company moved into the former Taha Tiki space on Manchester.
- The Sports Yard, a small-sided soccer facility from former professional player Wil Nyamsi, opened down the street from the new breakfast spot.
Hissong put her reasoning plainly when she talked about why Damn Fine expanded into the Grove instead of somewhere else: she wants to catch people heading to work or coming off a hospital shift, and give them a reliable spot to start the day. That's not a founder chasing a trend. That's an operator who already knows her numbers in Shaw deciding the Grove is worth a second bet.
The Traffic Behind the Turnover
It would be easy to read seven years of Chao Baan ending as a sign the neighborhood is cooling off. The numbers say otherwise. The Grove's business district logged 667,000 visitors between April and June 2026, according to district reporting covered by First Alert 4. That's a single quarter, and it's happening while Manchester itself is torn up. MoDOT spent this past summer resurfacing the corridor, and the Tower Grove Connector is opening new bike and pedestrian pathways linking Midtown to Tower Grove Park, both projects that create exactly the kind of short-term disruption that scares off a struggling business district.
Instead, restaurant groups are opening into the construction, not waiting it out. In a First Alert 4 report, Kelly Spencer, who owns The Social Affair at the Dogwood and sits on the business district's board, said: "Every business up and down this strip is authentic. It used to be nightlife and bars and you'd go out and hang out with your friends. It's still that, but the traffic increases every single year and they're coming to stay."
That last phrase is the important one. Bars and nightlife venues can pop up fast and close just as fast if a strip loses momentum. What's landing in the Grove this year, a fifth Jordan Goodman restaurant, a second Fiddlehead Fern, a second Damn Fine, is capital from people who've already proven a concept works somewhere else in St. Louis and are choosing to plant it here again. Nearby residential development and the growing popularity of the Foundry, the mixed-use project on the district's edge, are part of what's fueling that decision, according to the same reporting.
What This Means If You Live Here
Get to Chao Baan tonight if you can. Once the doors close after tonight's service, the Prapaisilp family has said there's no announced plan yet for the space, and no promise another Thai kitchen takes it over the same way. If you've never had the khao tod nam sod, this is the last chance.
After that, expect the corner of Tower Grove and Manchester to look different by winter. The old Vincent Van Doughnut storefront becomes Damn Fine Anytime's breakfast counter, which fills a gap the district has talked about for a while: a reliable morning spot in a strip that's historically leaned toward dinner and nightlife. Expect Manchester itself to stay a little rough around the edges through the rest of the resurfacing work, and expect the new Tower Grove Connector pathways to make the walk or ride down to Tower Grove Park easier than it's been in years.
None of this is really about whether the Grove is winning or losing. It's about which businesses decide their next move belongs here, and this season, the answer keeps coming back the same way.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually changing on your own streets, not just the headline version, that's the same lens I bring to how neighborhoods here perform for buyers and sellers. If you ever want to talk through what's happening in the Grove or any other St. Louis corridor you're watching, The Drew Group is a call away. Let's Connect.
