A St. Louis soul food staple with national acclaim will reopen its doors, though specific details are still unknown.
Sweetie Pies will return in a new location near the intersection of Dr. Martin Luther King Drive and Kingshighway in Kingshighway East. A banner with the message “coming soon” and the Sweetie Pies logo can be spotted on the side of the building.
Founder and restaurant owner Robbie Montgomery said via text message that while the signage has been on the building for about two weeks, she hasn’t picked a date for when the restaurant will reopen.
Montgomery is also planning to open an events space nearby.
Last year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that she planned to invest about $4 million for the space. City records show the property at 4949 Dr. Martin Luther King Drive has unpaid real estate taxes of $8,236 with an additional $1,482 in interest and $165 in penalty from 2023, as well as $8,499 for 2024, which is due by Dec. 31. Montgomery said she has until the end of the year to pay the taxes.
Montgomery, who’s also known for having been one of the Ikettes, the backup singers of Ike and Tina Turner, opened the first Sweetie Pies in 1996 in Dellwood. The restaurant’s success led her to open others across the region, including Sweetie Pies at the Mangrove in the Grove and another one in Grand Center. Montgomery expanded the restaurants to other states, too.
In 2011, the Oprah Winfrey Network aired “Welcome to Sweetie Pies,” a reality based around her family and restaurants. It became an immediate success and earned two NAACP Image Awards.
The Grove location closed in 2016, and Grace Meat + Three opened in the same space in 2017.
The last Missouri location, Sweetie Pies Upper Crust, closed its Grand Center doors in 2022. The last Sweetie Pies restaurant was in Jackson, Mississippi, and closed last year. It happened two months after her son Tim Norman was sentenced in a 2016 murder-for-hire plot against her grandson and was sentenced to life in prison.
She told the St. Louis American in 2022 that her son’s prison sentence had nothing to do with her decision to close the Grand Center location.
