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Yet by focusing on recipes from Fausto’s home outside Mexico City — and daring to stack one more ingredient on those towering tortas — the Pizarros fashioned one of St. Louis’ best Mexican restaurants.

At the end of August, Logan Ely will end the limited run of the Savage Accomplice, a sort of encore for his acclaimed Fox Park restaurants Savage and the Lucky Accomplice. Ely is one of St. Louis’ most forward-thinking and, at times, challenging chefs, and before the pandemic Savage (later, briefly renamed Shift) seemed poised to summit the highest rank of area restaurants. The Lucky Accomplice was more freewheeling by design, though Ely remained the kind of chef to make you dream about an eggplant dish for months after you ate it.

The coincidence of El Toluco and the Savage Accomplice closing nagged at me. I started listing the restaurants that I’ve celebrated in my reviews and the annual STL 100 that have closed since 2020. The list grew very quickly — more than 30 spots in a matter of minutes.

Restaurants close. Great ones, bad ones, all the ones in-between. But the past five years have proved especially challenging to the industry: the pandemic, labor shortages, inflation, tariffs.

In St. Louis, the toll of this half-decade has included great restaurants as well as blooming talents and a measure of the diversity of chefs and cuisines that a serious food scene requires. Here I offer some of the most prominent examples.

I don’t offer this list in the spirit of nostalgia. Great restaurants have opened in St. Louis over the past five years. One of them — Sado and its omakase counter Pavilion — ranked No. 1 in my 2025 STL 100.

On balance, though, the losses have outweighed the gains. In my 19 years on the St. Louis restaurant beat, the overall energy has never ebbed this low.

If this reflects what diners want, then I guess the market will only continue to adjust.

In the meantime, in addition to El Toluco and Ely’s restaurants, here is just some of what we’ve lost.

Bulrush: A year later, Rob Connoley’s decision to close Bulrush and leave St. Louis at the height of his Grand Center restaurant’s acclaim — he had only recently been a James Beard Award finalist — remains shocking. Connoley’s exhaustively researched, thoroughly modern homage to the cuisine of the Ozarks is irreplaceable, though his uncompromising approach should guide ambitious young chefs. Connoley’s departure, due to what he described as the state’s “hate politics� toward the LGBTQ community, is an unequivocal black eye for St. Louis and Missouri.

Elmwood: The pandemic struck right after a terrific year for new restaurants (Indo, Bulrush, the brick-and-mortar Balkan Treat Box). The shutdowns proved insurmountable for one of 2019’s best debuts, Chris Kelling and Adam Altnether’s Elmwood, a rare chef-driven restaurant unafraid to go big. But the sleek, expansive dining room needed the energy of a packed house enjoying Altnether’s borderless, coal-fired cooking. Both Kelling and Altnether have moved on, and even the coal-fired oven has found a new home at the terrific Esca, but Elmwood’s alchemy was unique.

Guerrilla Street Food: Guerrilla Street Food could show how the restaurant boom of the past two decades was primed for a correction. Brian Hardesty and Joel Crespo’s Filipino-inspired cooking grew from a food truck to multiple brick-and-mortar locations before retracting, then closing. (The brand was sold in 2022 but hasn’t reemerged.) I prefer to remember Guerrilla at its boundless best, respectful of traditional dishes but unafraid to cross borders and remix recipes, nowhere better than its signature pork over rice dish, the Flying Pig.

Juniper: In contrast, you could follow the shift in diners’ habits during that boom though Juniper, John Perkins’ thoughtful study of Southern cuisine. After crashing the St. Louis scene as an anonymous “underground� chef, Perkins grew Juniper from a pop-up into one of the area’s best restaurants, able to dazzle with either oysters or fried chicken (or both). Post-pandemic, Juniper struggled to adjust to diners’ shift to takeout, including a short-lived rebrand as the fried chicken-focused Sunday Best.

Nomad: The contemporary food scene spends too much time chasing the latest viral dish. No one will remember your take on Dubai chocolate when the next hot thing comes round. A hallmark of St. Louis’ culinary growth has been the number of spots dedicated to mastering only a few dishes or one dish — a number that has taken a hit in recent years. At Nomad, which closed last October after four years in Dogtown, Tommy Andrew wanted to become “the pastrami guy� and succeeded thanks to his zippy, succulent house-cured and -smoked pastrami.

With Nomad, you could also count such lately departed restaurants as the Banh Mi Shop (banh mi), Dixon’s BBQ (burnt ends smoked with all wood) and West Bank Street Eats (shawarma on freshly griddled flatbread). A singular focus, rather than viral clout, is another opportunity for younger chefs to make their names.

Rated Test Kitchen: But will talented young chefs choose to stay in St. Louis? That question has haunted me since Juwan Rice closed Rated Test Kitchen earlier this year (really, if you expand the question to all talented chefs, since Connoley left town). Rice, a professional cook since age 14 who is still in his early 20s, took a big swing with Rated Test Kitchen: an expensive tasting-menu spot in the heart of downtown. After its already impressive debut, Rated had taken a big leap forward when I returned early this year. Soon afterward, Rice said he would be touring the concept to other cities instead.

Tempus: Take nothing for granted: a truism of the restaurant industry that is only more potent now. Tempus should have been one of the 2020s’ signature debuts, a showcase for the modern cooking of Ben Grupe, already a James Beard Award semifinalist for his work last decade at Elaia. The pandemic delayed the opening of Tempus’ dining room by a year, but when Grupe finally unveiled his full vision, it was a winner, fusing his inventive technique with a customer-friendly prix-fixe model and earning him another James Beard Award semifinalist nod.

Yet Tempus parted ways with Grupe and, not long after, pivoted to pop-up events without any public explanation from its owner. Tempus has since closed and its Grove space remains empty today, a tantalizing, frustrating “What if?� And Grupe is yet another St. Louis chef in his prime whose food I wish diners could regularly enjoy.