Grace Meat + Three will serve its final plates after service on September 13, closing the doors on nine years of Southern-style cooking at 4270 Manchester Avenue in The Grove. Chef Rick Lewis and his wife, Elisa Lewis, announced the closure themselves, telling regulars that gradually slowing sales combined with rising labor and goods costs made the full-service restaurant increasingly difficult to sustain.
According to St. Louis Magazine, Rick Lewis said the meat-and-three concept had gradually become more about fried chicken and fish anyway, a shift that helped push the couple toward consolidating operations at their fast-casual spinoff, Grace Chicken + Fish, in Crestwood. Lewis also said he has personal reasons for scaling back: he and Elisa have a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and he wants more time with them. The Grove location will offer its final meals Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., through the closing date.
From Late-Night Window to Standalone Restaurant
Grace Chicken + Fish actually began life in September 2019 as a late-night walk-up window attached to Grace Meat + Three, before growing into its own operation with a 25-foot mobile kitchen added in 2022, per the same account. The Crestwood restaurant opened as a standalone location in June 2025, replacing King Edward's Chicken + Fish at 8654 Watson Road. That building now has the room to house the brand's operations, catering business, and food truck under one roof, and Lewis said it will not change its menu lineup significantly — fried chicken, cornmeal-crusted catfish made with domestic, farm-raised fish, beer-battered cod, shrimp, sandwiches and Southern sides will remain the draw, including a catfish po'boy built on six ounces of catfish before breading.
Lewis told the magazine he may add some Grace Meat + Three favorites to the Crestwood menu going forward, and that he expects to pursue both brand expansion and private events rather than reopening another full sit-down restaurant. The Grove space, with its 4,700 square feet and a bar Lewis said was never fully maximized, carried the kind of overhead that a leaner, counter-service model avoids. Grace Meat + Three's lease in The Grove is also coming up for renewal, adding a practical deadline to the decision.
A Nine-Year Run and a Staff in Transition
Grace Meat + Three opened in September 2017 inside the space that once housed Miss Robbie Montgomery's Sweetie Pie's at the Mangrove — the soul food restaurant made famous by the reality show Welcome to Sweetie Pie's — and briefly Sweet Times at the Mangrove, before Grace took over the address. In its own announcement, the restaurant invited the community to celebrate nine years of Southern food, hospitality and memories, noting that working-class families and young people made up the majority of its clientele.
Lewis said Grace Chicken + Fish cannot accommodate the entire Grove staff, so he has personally contacted nearby businesses in the neighborhood to help those employees find new positions. Before Grace, Lewis built his reputation with a 2014 James Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef semifinalist nomination while working at Quincy Street Bistro, and later developed the food program at Southern, the Nashville-style hot chicken spot he opened with Pappy's Smokehouse owner Mike Emerson in Midtown in June 2015; that restaurant closed permanently in January 2024, according to KSDK. Grace Meat + Three itself earned local acclaim in 2020, when Sauce Magazine readers named Lewis Chef of the Year and voted the restaurant top honors for Favorite Fried Chicken and Favorite Soul/Southern Food.
The Grove Faces a Broader Squeeze
Grace's closure adds to a rough stretch for the Manchester Avenue corridor. Everest Cafe and Bar, a Forest Park Southeast fixture since 2004, shut down for good after 22 years, citing staffing shortages and post-pandemic economic pressure. GroveFest, the neighborhood's signature street festival that has drawn as many as 50,000 attendees, also canceled its 2026 run and moved to a biannual schedule after producer Park Central Development cited escalating staging, security and vendor costs.
The pressure isn't confined to The Grove. St. Louis barbecue chain Salt + Smoke closed its Hampton and Ellisville locations in July, shrinking from eight metro-area restaurants down to six to tighten quality control and offset rising overhead. Nationally, a 2026 National Restaurant Association survey found that 90% of food and beverage operators named elevated food costs, labor expenses, commercial insurance rates, energy bills and credit card swipe fees as top threats to their survival — the same combination of pressures Lewis pointed to in explaining Grace's shift.
Even so, Grace isn't disappearing. The brand is narrowing from a labor-intensive, full-service meat-and-three format to the streamlined counter-service model already running in Crestwood, where the company sees room to scale. Other operators are still betting on The Grove: Atomic by Jamo is amping up its program in the neighborhood, and Good Hospitality still runs five restaurants there, per the magazine's report. For now, Grace Meat + Three's nine-year chapter in the neighborhood closes on September 13, with the chicken and fish living on a few miles away in Crestwood.
