Expat BBQ at City Foundry STL: a first look at the new restaurant from Niche Food Group

The new St. Louis barbecue spot from Gerard Craft will open on Sept. 12

Chef Gerard Craft’s Niche Food Group will open Expat BBQ at 3730 Foundry Way inside City Foundry STL in Midtown St. Louis on Thursday, Sept. 12. The globally inspired “well-traveled barbecue” concept is the group's largest restaurant or bar project to date, its 11th overall and its fourth at City Foundry STL.

The restaurant features three distinct spaces spread across three levels and a total 16,000 square feet. The first-floor dining room will offer dinner service from 5 to 10 p.m. daily. The third-floor terrace, with an outdoor space looking out across Midtown, will offer fast-casual lunch and dinner service 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and from 11 a.m. until 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. Both dining rooms have a dedicated bar. An event space on the second floor is the final piece of the puzzle, offering ample room for seated dinners, happy hours and other events.

The conception and execution of Expat BBQ has been three years in the making, and the results are impressive to say the least. The interior inherits details left over from City Foundry’s industrial past – pipes that snake around the space, huge silos that stretch across all three floors. The design builds around the historical hardware, investing the restaurant with a playful spirit. There are colorful vintage travel posters on the first floor; look out for the wallpaper featuring monkeys sipping from bottles of vodka by the third-floor bathrooms; and if you’re dining inside one of the nooks on the first floor, look up and you’ll see mirrors built into those gigantic silos for a must-have photo op.

Perhaps Expat’s most immediately iconic design feature, Patty, a concrete sculpture of a pink elephant, greets you upon arrival on the Terrace. Artists Tony Rocca and Kurt Knickmeyer were commissioned to create the piece for Expat, with an intentional nod to Bob Cassilly, the creator of the City Museum. It’s mostly a bit of fun, something to snap a photo of, but it also feels like a deliberate reminder that this restaurant is “well traveled” and also grounded in its St. Louis – and American – barbecue traditions.

Gerard Craft said the menu’s starting point is American barbecue recipes, which have been reimagined and inspired by flavors and ingredients from food cultures around the world. “We take all these familiar American barbecue recipes – Carolina barbecue sauces, bourbon barbecue sauces, brisket, St. Louis-style ribs – and put them through a filter as if we were traveling somewhere else,” Craft said. Executive chef Sam Nawrocki said that idea of exploring different cultures through barbecue was what drew her to Expat. “Barbecue is traditionally very regional, but what we’re doing here is taking those regional roots and expanding them to incorporate flavors from all over the world,” she said.

To illustrate the point, Craft talked us through the St. Louis ribs, which are infused with Chinese ingredients like five-spice and chile crisp, and finished with a baijiu-whiskey barbecue sauce. “It’s like taking a bourbon barbecue sauce and completely transforming it,” said Craft. “At the end of the day, it still tastes familiar, but it’s so different.”

Other entrees include: lamb shoulder brushed with pomegranate molasses and rubbed with fresh bay leaf, black and green cardamom, cumin, coriander and clove, then chopped and served with a yogurt-based white barbecue sauce; or beef brisket brushed with chipotle in adobo and rubbed in Yucatan spice rub, before being served with avocado salsa verde. “It’s a way to introduce people to different flavors while still giving them something they recognize,” Nawrocki said. The sandwich menu continues in a similar vein, and the menu of sides includes things like Mexican-inspired mac and cheese and black beans with Chinese sausage, black bean paste and black vinegar.

One dish that Nawrocki is particularly proud of is the Spanish-inspired twice-smoked sweet potato a sherry barbecue sauce and parsley, garlic, capers and lemon. “Barbecue doesn’t always have to be about meat,” she said. “It’s about the method and the flavors, and we’re really pushing the boundaries with that.”

Nawrocki also said collaboration has been key to developing the menu at Expat. “Working with Gerard and the rest of the team has been incredible,” she said. “We all bring different experiences and ideas to the table, and that diversity is what makes the menu so unique.”

“The foundation is American-style barbecue recipes, but imagine you’re living like an expat in China or Korea – what does your pantry look like when you go to the grocery store to fill in all these blanks?” Craft said.

Limited dinner reservations are available starting Aug. 30 via Tock.