I actually grabbed lunch there today, and they have the waist-high trophy sitting in their lobby. Along with the 2nd and 3rd place trophies from different years. I probably should have said the people running the restaurant won, not the actual restaurant itself.
I just want to say that this thread makes me miss home. A lot.
I also like Imo’s Pizza.
Sure, St. Louis suffers in comparison to Chicago, but my home town does have a fair amount going for it. Some of he 'burbs, like Maryland Heights and Olivette are pretty dismal. But, Clayton, Webster Groves, and St. Charles (old downtown) are fine. In St. Louis itself, the Central West End is a great place to live if you like walking to some good restaurants and bars and being close to a major university and mondo park with lots of free things to do. Soulard is great for serious drinking. McGurk’s has live Irish bands very frequently (maybe every week? I don’t remember anymore). The Hill, sometimes called America’s Other Little Italy, has wonderful restaurants. And there are (or at least were) even some Bosnain places on the south side. The Loop in University City has some cool places and quirky shops. The crowd leans toward the college-aged, but I still like dropping by whenever I can. With the MetroLink, you can ride the train pretty easily from dowtown to the Central West End to the Loop.
I live in Cincinnati now, which I figure is about the same size as StL. Whenever I get off my ass and grab the local entertainment paper, I find myself saying, “Wow, that’s going on this weekend?!” Same thing in StL. You can find lots to do with a little effort. Pick up the Riverfront Times or go online and see what’s going on. Call it “The RFT” to sound like a local.
Did I mention I miss home?
Heh heh.
“So where’d you go to high school?”
“University of Washington.”
That’ll impress 'em for sure! 
Not to mention whenever I do say University of Washington people look at me like surely I must mean Washington University but can’t keep it straight 'cause I’m full of shit (or from out of town, not sure which is considered worse ). Really, though, I have to say that I haven’t run into the question nearly as often as I did when I first moved here. I live and work in the city, where there seems to be a lot more out-of-towners living and milling about than when I lived in Richmond Heights or South County.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I do like Imo’s (and White Castle!). That should ingratiate me to the locals, for sure. I like all pizza, though. Even crappy frozen ones. Life’s too short to eat only one style of pizza (admittedly, Chicago style is my favorite).
I stuck my nose in at Wash U in 1984 while scouting colleges. The school impressed me, but the rest of St. Louis was eerily deathlike. I wound up at Ann Arbor and was in general pleased.
I agree there’s a pretty good jazz scene there. But despite being a jazz fan myself, I find the music thrives best in less livable cities.
The most expensive part of a good pizza is the cheese. Imo’s has managed to figure out how to get the population to not only accept a cheap cheese substitute, but convince them it’s worth paying regular pizza prices for it. The idea of a “clean bite” was a brilliant marketing strategy to make a bad quality of the fake cheese appear better. A business that so successfully cuts cost really can’t do anything but succeed.
If that’s the style of pizza you like, that’s fine. Everybody has different tastes. You may have trouble convincing non-natives that it is better than Tombstone. I vividly remember my reaction to the pizza I ordered at the recommendation of locals. They didn’t know how to put BBQ sauce on a pizza and the cheese was fake. I was livid.
As for ethnic food, there used to be an out of this world Indian restaurant on the 12th floor of the Howard Johnson by the airport. I think it is called India Palace. It is still there, and it is still nice, but I think the ownership has changed. Possibly, it is better in the evening. It was the best Indian food I’d ever had ten years ago.
TJ’s Pizza This taste just like Imos Pizza in my opinion. They are good, I found one at a local liquor store but you can order online. Man do I like Imos.
ETA: Looking more into their website, they use provolone cheese. It saddens me that I am addicted to cheap cheese. They all have a mozzarella version if that may be worth more, I dunno.
From that website TJ’s uses provolone. Provolone is not cheap cheese, it is actually cheese. It’s an interesting choice for cheese on a pizza, but beats cheddar. I’d be interested to find out how this stuff tastes. Imo’s uses Provel. Provel is cheap cheese substitute
Don’t feel bad about what you like, just be aware to the strong negative reaction non-natives may have to it. Specifically, the cheese is the problem for most.
Provel is just a blend of three cheeses – provolone, swiss, and cheddar. It is processed together in some way, but it is “real” cheese. I made a pretty good provel myself by mixing equal parts shredded swiss, provolone, and cheddar at home a whie back.
Didn’t you just say people who liked it are dupes? But, the dupes shouldn’t feel bad about that, right?
Really, the sense of superiority over the choice of cheese on a pizza is kind of puzzling.
St. Louis was great in 1904, at the World’s Fair. It’s gone downhill ever since.
I’m in St Louis for the first time this week. A couple of thoughts:
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Imo’s Pizza really sucks. Just stay away.
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Left Field Landing at the ballpark rocks! I’m pretty sure I’ll never get tickets to this area again (it only had about 35 seats) but with food (hot dogs, sausages, and nachos) plus all you can drink beer for $45, I don’t think I’d be happy sitting the the regular seats again. And hey, the Cards won tonight!
Since there are so many people knocking it, I’ll add that I love Imo’s pizza.
Me, too!
Another Imo’s eater here. And I routinely put Provel on lots of dishes. Trying to eat “lighter” this summer, and one of my favorite “quick & easy” supper dishes is a diced, marinated chicken breast, cooked quick in pan (almost like a stri-fry). I then serve it up an a large-ish bed of lettuce, and sprinkle lightly with some Provel.
I like to think of St. Louis as “Neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat.” It’s one of the western outliers of the rust belt (just look at the industries around downtown), as well as having a decent tech base/industries in/around it.
It’s the northern-most southern city, or one of the southern-most northern cities, eastern-most…well, you get the idea. It’s been a crossroads of trade and migration for much of its history, and each group of people passing through it (or staying), and each era, has left its mark on it.
As such, it has elements of a lot of different parts of the US, with none of them predominating beyond certain “enclaves” of St. Louis and its surrounding metro. In this regard, St. Louis is fairly cosmopolitan. And yes, someone will, soooner or later, ask where you went to high school and try to pigeonhole you on that basis. :rolleyes:
I live in Maryland Heights. In spite of what others upthread think, it is a clean, quiet community, with easy road access to other areas. Since I’m not seeking the “Bohemian Experience” in the place I lie down at night to go to sleep, it works for me. If you like impromptu street theater underneath your bedroom window at 1:00 AM Sunday morning, well, St. Louis has areas for that. 
Others upthread have mentioned our excellent city/county parks and museums, and I’ll just add my hearty endorsement to their excellent recommendations. Outside of the immediate St. Louis metro, there are many great state parks and lots of natural beauty to see and enjoy. Our perrenial family favorite is Johnson Shut-Ins State Park.
Summers can be oppressively humid. If you spend most of your working day in a climate-controlled facility, walking out the door at work at 4:00 PM in the afternoon to go home can be a shocker. We are in the region that is the boundary between the Jet Stream and the Gulf Stream, and it moves back-and-forth across the region alternating between warm/moist and cool/dry, and can spawn some awesome storms (incl. tornadoes).
Missouri itself is an example of extremes. There are honest-to-God multi-generational toothless Hillbillies living proudly in crushing poverty in the middle of nowhere right next to the weekend getaways for affluent urbanites. Driving down state hwy. 21, you can see everything from modern ranches/farms to older but well maintained farmsteads next to tralier parks that looked like somone tossed a bomb in a Goodwill collection dumpster, all within a stretch of road a few miles long.
In summary, St. Louis, and Missouri overall, has a decent offering of a multi-cultural, multi-generational experience, with urban, suburban, and rural examples of each, even if we don’t have the bestest, finest examples of such.
Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan (himself a non-native) likes to point out that when St. Louis calls itself the “Gateway to the West” it’s really admitting that the people who settled here are the ones who decided they couldn’t go any further and gave up.
I think McClellan summarized it thus: “We’re the only city in the world that put up a monument to the people who left.”