Walk down Lockwood Avenue on a warm evening this August and the storefront at 227 W. Lockwood is dark. No string lights on the patio, no chalkboard sign, none of the low hum that used to spill out of Robust Bistro & Wine Bar most nights of the week for the better part of eighteen years. A few blocks over on Big Bend, the opposite is true. DD Mau's new dining room is lit up and busy, the kind of busy where you can see people waiting near the door for a table.
Both of these blocks sit inside Webster Groves. Neither is more "Webster Groves" than the other. But they're telling two very different stories about what happens to a small business here right now, and the difference has less to do with food trends than with who actually owns the building.
The Rent Came Due On Lockwood
Robust Bistro & Wine Bar opened in 2007 and became one of the anchors of the Old Webster business district, known for a wine list organized by what the restaurant called its "Robust Factor" rather than by grape or region. Owners Stanley and Arlene Browne kept it running for eighteen years, weathering a 2019 Chapter 11 restructuring and the earlier closures of satellite locations in Edwardsville and downtown St. Louis, before this year finally caught up with the flagship.
In October 2025, the building's landlord, McCallum Group LLC, sued the restaurant for more than $84,000 in unpaid rent and other charges. By January 2026, with no word from the landlord's attorneys, Stanley Browne told reporters he felt he had to "assume the worst," and the couple announced Robust would close for good on January 31, 2026. In the same breath, they confirmed something else: longtime executive chef Zach Dale and his wife Kelcey, Robust's beverage director since its early days, were negotiating to buy the business themselves. Zach and Kelcey told St. Louis Magazine that "besides a few minor tweaks, very few changes are planned" if the deal goes through. But the deal was never in their hands alone. It needed the landlord's sign-off, and according to the most recent public reporting on the sale, from January 2026, that sign-off still hadn't come.
A few things worth knowing if you're the kind of person who checks a storefront window on your way to the coffee shop:
- Address: 227 W. Lockwood Ave., in the heart of Old Webster
- Closed: January 31, 2026, after eighteen years
- The dispute: a landlord lawsuit over more than $84,000 in alleged back rent
- The proposed buyers: Zach and Kelcey Dale, Robust's own longtime chef and beverage director
- Status per the most recent public reporting (January 2026): unresolved, pending landlord approval
The Brownes aren't leaving the neighborhood entirely. They're still co-owners of Madrina, the Italian-American restaurant they opened in 2023 in the former C.J. Muggs space with Frank Romano and Laura Burns of The Parkmoor Drive-In. So the same families are still cooking in Webster Groves. It's just that one of their buildings is currently empty because they didn't own it.
Big Bend Bought Its Own Corner
Now walk the other direction. DD Mau, the fast-casual Vietnamese restaurant that started in Maryland Heights in 2018, opened a small second location on Allen Avenue in Webster Groves in 2021. Owner Julie Truong Shih and her husband, Andrew Shih, spent the next few years outgrowing it. When the longtime sports bar Weber's Front Row closed its doors at 8169 Big Bend Blvd., Truong Shih bought the vacant building in 2023.
That single decision changed the entire timeline of what came next. Because they owned the building instead of leasing it, they could spend roughly a year on design work with the firm TAO + LEE Associates and another eight months on construction, reshaping a former sports bar into a 6,000-square-foot restaurant with a 150-seat dining room, a beer and wine license the old location never had, and a dedicated event space built for private dinners and the kind of Asian wedding-style banquets Andrew's great-uncle used to host at Mandarin House on Olive Boulevard. The new DD Mau opened for a soft launch on November 20, 2025, with a grand opening the next day, and by December they'd added a small-batch, house-made chile oil to the retail shelf.
None of that construction schedule was set by a lease renewal date or a landlord's patience. It was set by how long the Shihs decided it should take to build the restaurant they wanted.
One Corner Rented. One Corner Bought.
That's really the difference between these two blocks this year, and it's easy to miss if you only look at what's serving food and what isn't. Old Orchard, the business district centered on the 8100 block of Big Bend between Lockwood and Laclede Station, is filling in because an owner-operator had the room and the runway to build exactly what she wanted. Old Webster is still working through an open question because a tenant's relationship with a landlord broke down over money, and the resolution now depends on people who don't work in the restaurant at all.
If you're the kind of person who notices this stuff on a dog walk or a school run, that's the detail worth carrying with you past both storefronts. It's not that one district is thriving and the other is struggling. It's that one storefront's future got decided by its owner, and the other's is being decided by a lawsuit and a phone that hasn't rung yet.
What's Already On the September Calendar
Whatever happens at 227 W. Lockwood, one thing on the fall calendar is settled. The Old Webster Jazz & Blues Festival returns on Saturday, September 19, 2026, from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m., with two stages set up around Gore and Allen avenues in the historic district. Admission and parking are free, as they always have been, and the festival regularly draws more than 12,000 people over the course of the day. It's billed as the longest-running jazz festival in St. Louis, and it doesn't care whether the corner three blocks away has a tenant yet.
That contrast is worth sitting with too. A free festival that's been showing up on the third Saturday of September for as long as most residents can remember, right next to a storefront where nobody quite knows what September will look like. Webster Groves holds both of those truths at once most years. This year they're just easier to see side by side.
Both Corners Are Still Webster Groves
None of this means one district "won" and the other "lost." Old Webster still has Madrina, Cyrano's, Dewey's, and a jazz festival that's outlasted several restaurant ownership changes on the same three blocks. Old Orchard still has Civil Alchemy, The Annex, and now a bigger, better-funded DD Mau that isn't going anywhere. What's changed is the texture of walking through each district this fall. One feels settled because an owner finished a two-year project on her own timeline. One feels unsettled because a lease ran out before a sale could close.
If you live within walking distance of either strip, that's the kind of thing you'll notice before anyone writes it down. Consider this the write-down.
If you're thinking about what any of this means for your own street in Webster Groves, or just want to talk through what a corner like this one is worth to a buyer someday, Maureen Onder has spent more than thirty years walking these same blocks and is always glad to talk it through.
