Robbie Montgomery is building a new Sweetie Pie's from the ground up on Martin Luther King Drive at Kingshighway in St. Louis, and the 86-year-old says construction is moving quickly enough that she hopes to open as early as September. The new restaurant will come with an event center and three parking lots, including space for tour buses, and Miss Robbie is also stepping back behind the microphone for the first time in years.
Montgomery told FOX 2 that parking was a persistent headache at her earlier restaurants, so the new property was designed with three lots from the start. She plans to bring musicians, comedians and other performers to the attached event center, turning the site into something bigger than a dining room. The station reports the opening could still be delayed by construction, even as Montgomery expresses optimism about the timeline.
The menu will keep many longtime Sweetie Pie's favorites, including chicken wings and macaroni and cheese, while adding several new dishes, according to the same report. Montgomery has said customers in St. Louis proved a soul food restaurant could succeed here, a track record she is now leaning on to relaunch the brand in the neighborhood where she grew up.
A Homecoming Rooted in North St. Louis
Montgomery left St. Louis decades ago as an Ikette performing with Ike and Tina Turner, and she went on to spend decades in California working as a background singer. She has said she is excited about the comeback of the Martin Luther King Drive and Kingshighway area, the same stretch of North St. Louis where she was raised. Two years ago, Montgomery appeared at the dedication of a Tina Turner tribute mural nearby, a moment covered by Hoodline's report on the Ville mural that highlighted her ties to Turner and to the corridor.
An illness eventually brought Montgomery back to St. Louis, where she worked at a local hospital before she eventually opened Sweetie Pie's. She has said she learned her cooking skills from her mother and from years of working on the road, back when performers waited, dressed and ate on their tour bus because they could not mingle with patrons at white venues even though they were performing at those same venues. Those years, she has said, shaped both her recipes and her resolve.
Music, Her First Love, Comes Back Too
Montgomery is scheduled to perform on August 28 at Blue Strawberry, an intimate St. Louis music lounge, in a show billed as “Ms. Robbie One More Time.” Her return to the stage follows a career that began as a backup singer for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, a run that ended when a collapsed lung forced her to stop touring, according to the St. Louis Blues Society. She went on to spend more than two decades as an R&B background vocalist for acts including Stevie Wonder, Dr. John, Barbra Streisand and The Rolling Stones, and she has released new songs as part of her return to music.
“Music is my first love and chicken is my second,” Montgomery has said, according to FOX 2's report. She has also said simply that she believed in herself through the years of rebuilding, a line that captures the throughline between her restaurant career and her return to singing.
A Brand Shaped by Fame and Tragedy
Sweetie Pie's carries outsized national name recognition for a St. Louis soul food brand, built largely on the nine-season run of “Welcome to Sweetie Pie's” on the Oprah Winfrey Network between 2011 and 2018. The show won two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Reality Series and was, according to TV One, OWN's first major breakout reality hit.
That fame has coexisted with tragedy. In March 2023, Montgomery's son and former co-star James “Tim” Norman was sentenced to life in federal prison after a jury convicted him of murder-for-hire charges in the 2016 fatal shooting of his 20-year-old nephew, Andre Montgomery Jr. Federal prosecutors proved Norman orchestrated the killing to collect on a $450,000 life insurance policy, according to the St. Louis American. Three co-conspirators were also sentenced in the case, including gunman Travell Anthony Hill, who received 32 years in prison, while co-defendants Terica Ellis and insurance agent Waiel Rebhi Yaghnam each received three-year sentences, the paper reported.
Rebuilding After the Upper Crust Closed
The last remaining St. Louis-area Sweetie Pie's, the Upper Crust on Delmar Boulevard in Grand Center, closed permanently in September 2022 after 25 years of local operation, making way for a multi-hundred-million-dollar expansion of the neighboring John Cochran VA Medical Center, according to Sauce Magazine. The brand's roots in the metro area stretch back to 1996, when Montgomery founded the original restaurant in the north St. Louis suburb of Dellwood before expanding to The Grove in 2006 and opening the Upper Crust in 2012, per NextSTL.
Development filings for the new project, dubbed “Sweetie Pie's 2nd Act,” describe a multi-million-dollar commercial redevelopment on Martin Luther King Drive featuring a 160-seat dining room alongside the event space, according to KSDK. The scale of the investment underscores the stakes for Montgomery as she works to reestablish the brand's physical footprint in the city where it began, even as construction timelines remain in flux.
