McCormick & Schmick's closed its doors in the Restaurant Village at West County Center back in 2019. The space sat there through a pandemic, through a wave of mall closures across the region, through years of foot traffic that had somewhere else to go. Seven years is a long time for a prime restaurant pad to stay dark, especially one anchoring a 1.1 million-square-foot mall at the intersection of I-270 and Manchester Road.
This spring, the Des Peres Board of Aldermen finally moved to transfer that space's conditional use permit to The Cheesecake Factory. Construction is now underway, with an opening targeted for this fall. It is easy to read that as one company filling one hole. It is more accurate, and more useful if you actually live here, to see it as the last piece of a pattern that has been playing out across town for the better part of a year: long-vacant restaurant spaces in Des Peres are getting filled almost simultaneously, and the tenants moving in are not experimenting. They are chains that watched this suburb prove itself first.
The Restaurant Village Vacancy Nobody Could Fill
West County Center's Restaurant Village unit 17 is not an obscure address. It sits inside a mall that CBL Properties has been actively re-leasing this year, adding Levi's, L'Occitane, Perfumania and Urban Outfitters alongside the Cheesecake Factory buildout. But a national sit-down brand walking away from a regional market and then coming back tells you something about what changed in between.
Cheesecake Factory's other close-in location, at Chesterfield Mall, closed when that mall shut down entirely and was later demolished to make way for the $2 billion Downtown Chesterfield redevelopment. That left the Galleria in Richmond Heights as the only Cheesecake Factory left standing in St. Louis County. For a few years, if you wanted the chain without driving into the city or across the state to Kansas City, you were out of luck. Founder and CEO David Overton framed the return in a company statement, saying the chain looks forward to "being a part of the Des Peres community." What that statement leaves out is the seven-year gap between the old McCormick & Schmick's closing and a replacement finally getting a signed permit. The mall didn't lose its appeal in the interim. It lost its second-choice restaurant tenant and had to wait for demand elsewhere in the region to make a comeback worth the buildout cost.
A Half Mile West, the Same Story Four Times Over
Walk or drive a few minutes west on Manchester and you hit Des Peres Corners, the Schnucks-anchored strip center at Manchester and North Ballas. In April, the Board of Aldermen approved permits for four restaurants in a single meeting, and every one of them is moving into a space that went dark first.
| Address | Former tenant | New tenant | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1052 N. Ballas Road | Five Guys | Dave's Hot Chicken | Open, serving regular hours |
| 12340 Manchester Road | First Community Credit Union branch | Cava | Targeted for mid-August opening |
| 1090 Ballas Road | Jimmy John's | Toastique | Targeted for summer 2026 |
| Des Peres Corners | Not specified in city filings | Sourdough & Company | Targeted for summer 2026 |
| 17 West County Center | McCormick & Schmick's | The Cheesecake Factory | Targeted for fall 2026 |
Dave's Hot Chicken is the one you can already visit. It got its conditional use permit last summer and opened in the former Five Guys space last fall, but not with the look the chain usually wants. Its franchise operator asked the city for permission to wrap the exterior in the brand's signature bright, graffiti-style street art, which the operator's representative told the board drives sales by 30 to 40 percent at other locations. The Planning and Zoning Commission wasn't convinced it fit the shopping center's design standards, and the bill covering the artwork failed to get a reading at the aldermen meeting. The restaurant opened without it, though it did get approval to stay open until midnight instead of the standard 10 p.m. If the Des Peres location looks a little more subdued than the Dave's Hot Chicken you've seen elsewhere, that's a city council decision, not a corporate one.
Cava's arrival is its own small correction to how the story got reported. Coverage over the summer called it the chain's first St. Louis-area location, but Cava actually opened its true regional debut in Cottleville in April, with Des Peres slated as the second. The Des Peres build-out is converting a former bank branch, which is a heavier lift than taking over an existing restaurant shell, and it's part of why the opening window has run from a fall 2025 permit filing to a mid-August target nearly a year later.
The Chains Wouldn't Be Betting Here If Something Hadn't Already Worked
None of this is Des Peres getting discovered for the first time. Porano, the fast-casual pasta concept from Gerard Craft's Niche Food Group, reopened at 13323 Manchester Road after a six-year absence following its original downtown run, and chose the location partly because of easy parking and proximity to other local draws like Tiger Soup Dumplings and Rosalita's Cantina. It's still there, and the menu has been refreshed as of this year. Taziki's Mediterranean Cafe opened at Colonnade Center in spring 2025, two blocks east of the mall, and has stuck around long enough to become a routine lunch stop rather than a novelty.
Those two openings predate the current wave by a year or more, and they matter because they're proof of concept. A national chain deciding where to put its next fast-casual location is looking at exactly this kind of data: did the last comparable format survive here, and for how long. Porano and Taziki's answered that question before Cava, Toastique, or Sourdough & Company ever filed a permit application.
What Changes for You This Fall
If you live in Des Peres, the practical version of all this is straightforward. A stretch of Manchester and North Ballas that had four dead storefronts a year ago will, by the time the Cheesecake Factory buildout wraps this fall, have five new restaurants operating within a few minutes' drive of each other. You will not need to leave the city limits for a Nashville-style hot chicken sandwich, a build-your-own Mediterranean bowl, or a sit-down dinner with fifty cheesecake options on the menu.
The other seasonal marker worth knowing is that Des Peres Park's free Summer Concert Series, held the second Friday of June, July and August and sponsored by neighbors like Central Bank of St. Louis, Edward Jones, Schnucks, and St. Luke's Des Peres Hospital, wrapped its 2026 run in mid-August. That's the community half of the same story: local businesses underwriting a free event in the park at 12325 Manchester Road, timed to the same summer stretch when the restaurant permits were clearing the Board of Aldermen. Between the concert series and the restaurant openings, this has been a summer where Des Peres quietly reinvested in its own commercial center rather than waiting for something else to fill the gaps.
None of the storefronts sitting empty a year ago were empty because the location didn't work. They were empty because the last tenant's business model didn't, and it took time for the right replacement to sign a lease and finish a buildout. That's a useful thing to know the next time a familiar storefront in this city goes dark. It rarely stays that way for long.
If you're watching the West County corridor for reasons beyond dinner plans, whether you're weighing a move within Des Peres or just keeping an eye on how the neighborhood is evolving, the team at Lynn Andel tracks these changes as part of daily work in the St. Louis central corridor and inner-ring suburbs. List Well. Buy Smart.
