Lost Tables: Bobby's Creole

Bobby's Creole

Bob Suberi grew up on the West Coast in Lakewood, California. He graduated from Mayfair High School in 1966.

Barbara Walters grew up on the East Coast in Westbury, New York. She graduated from W. Tresper Clarke High School in 1969.


Bob Suberi Mayfair High School, 1966	Barbara Walters W. Tresper Clarke High School, 1969

Bob Suberi and Barbara Walters met in 1975 at the University of Michigan, where they were doctoral candidates in pharmacology. But by the following year, they realized that pharmacology wasn't something either one of them wanted to do.

Bob’s roommate's wife was a professor at Wash U in Chinese studies and she told us about this guy who was running seafood from New Orleans up to St. Louis and he wanted to go back to school. He wanted to get rid of it, and we thought, that sounds pretty Bohemian, let’s go check that out. And that’s how we ended up here running seafood.

Suberi and Walters built a small fish stand for University City's Market in the Loop, in the 6600 block of Delmar. They drove back and forth to New Orleans once a week to procure shrimp, fish, oysters, crabs and spices, and sold them from their stand on Saturdays.

Suberi and Walters' seafood stand in the U City Loop

The fish stand was kind of a means to an end. Bob had this idea of a restaurant. His mother was an incredible cook and she ran the kitchen at the University of Judaism in Hollywood. He kind of had it more in his blood than I did. I was the queen of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But I also had a really strong science background. I knew how to run experiments. There’s a correlation there. I had that type of mind that ultimately could look at a cookbook and tell you what it’s going to taste like. This will work with this and that will work with that.

Suberi and Walters lived in an apartment in the Loop and frequented a small vegetarian restaurant on Delmar.

We had eaten at Our Daily Bread, it was really cheap, you go in there and you get coffee for a quarter and sit there all day long. So we would have our little meetings and stuff there. The guy wanted to sell it; he went on to become an architect. And so we just bought the business from him, not the building. It was kind of perfect; it was a good size.

Bobby's Creole opened in July of 1977 at 6318 Delmar, just east of the Tivoli Theatre and west of Streetside Records.

Bobby's Creole, 6318 Delmar

Both Suberi and Walters had grown up with the nickname "Bobby," although Walters had reverted to Barbara in college.

I wanted to call it Walters’ and he wanted to call it Suberi’s, and I’m like, well that’s not going to work. So we had a friend that came in and said, “Why don’t you just call it Bobby’s?” And we were like, “Whoa, well that’s a good idea! What a nice compromise."

Bobby's Creole seated 35 and looked much the way it did when it was Our Daily Bread, with a simple decor and a variety of mismatched chairs. Initially, the two owners cooked together in the kitchen, but once they obtained a liquor license the following spring, Suberi became bartender and host.

Bobby's Creole Interior, 6318 Delmar

About a month after opening Bobby's Creole, Bob Suberi and Barbara Walters decided to get married. This posed a problem for St. Louis Post-Dispatch restaurant critic Joe Pollack, as detailed in his September 14, 1977 review of the restaurant.

Following normal procedure, I waited about a month from its opening, then dropped by for dinner one evening. It was a pleasant visit, and I made plans to return.
That's when the difficulties began. My next trip was brought up short by a sign in the window that said, "Closed for Honeymoon," but that's understandable, and I muttered some sort of congratulatory words around some profanity as we searched for another establishment. When I went by again, the sign had been changed to read, "Closed on Tuesdays," and it's easy to figure what day it was.

Pollack's third trip to the restaurant was a success, and after his glowing review, business took off.

Bobby's Creole offered authentic Creole cooking. The restaurant's menu was heavy with shrimp and oysters. Barbara Suberi had found many of the recipes on her weekly fish runs through the Louisiana bayous. The rest were compliments of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The restaurant critic for The Times-Picayune put out a great cookbook and I would take that cookbook and just pick it apart. And that’s where a few of the more sophisticated recipes came from. Between the ladies in the bayous and The Times-Picayune, that’s pretty much where all the recipes came from.
But then I’d have to be constantly adjusting for St. Louis palates. There would be people who would come up from New Orleans and say, "That’s not very spicy." Well, have you eaten in other restaurants in St. Louis?
We’re a lot more sophisticated in our restaurants now and in our palate. Bun back then we had Chinese food, Italian food and then we came along.


Bobby's Creole Menu, 1977 (click image to enlarge)

In June of 1978, the Suberis sold their Market in the Loop seafood business, which they had continued to operate along with their restaurant. They sold it to another Bob and Barbara – Bob and Barbara Mepham – who would sell fish for many years thereafter as Bob's Seafood.

By the summer of 1979, Bobby's Creole had outgrown their space. Plus, the Suberis wanted to add a separate bar area with live music to their restaurant. So they purchased the building across the street at 6307-09 Delmar. The 6307 address had been occupied by the Mound City Shelled Nut Company since 1964 and was about three times the size of their restaurant.

6307 Delmar, Summer 1979

By September of 1979, Bobby's Creole had moved across the street. Originally, the bar and restaurant were both in the front. Once the back was rehabbed, the front became a lounge with a bar and live music.

The back dining room had a New Orleans street scene on one wall, with colorful canopies above the tables and window shutters on an adjoining wall. Carnations in praline liqueur bottles decorated the tables.

Bobby's Creole Dining Room, 6307 Delmar
(click image to enlarge)

Bobby's Creole Dining Room, 6307 Delmar

While its address had changed, Bobby's Creole continued to offer a mixture of Cajun and Creole dishes. Several times a week, freshly caught crab, shrimp and fish were driven in from New Orleans. In an October 11, 1979 review, Joe Pollack was still enthusiastic about the Suberis' menu.

As far as the food was concerned, we found it splendid. Items that should have been freshly prepared turned out to be exactly that, and everything was hot and flavorful. Someone in the kitchen knows just how long to cook fish so that it is tender, yet perfectly flavorful.
At the same time, dishes that require lots of cooking received it, so that the herbs and spices could permeate everything and the various flavors blend properly. Red beans and rice, with chunks of spicy sausage, were a perfect example of that, and even though I'm not a great fan of the dish, I could enjoy it.
The same was true of both gumbos, which we also sampled as appetizers. I like the file better, but both were quite good, with plenty of bay leaf.
Oysters Bienville were fresh and juicy, with a pleasant cheese sauce, and the shrimp with remoulade sauce was outstanding. The shrimp were exceptional, large and pink and unpeeled, cooked so that they retained all their flavor and texture in sharp contrast to too many restaurants where the shrimp is cooked into mushy oblivion. The remoulade sauce, served on the side, had a wonderful bite of spice, and even though peeling shrimp is not the neatest activity for an evening, the effect was spectacular.

It's been a long time, but the crab cakes at Bobby's, light and hot, with a slight taste of pepper and the sweetness of crab meat, were the best I've had since my last visit to Chesapeake Bay or the press box at Memorial Stadium, where the World Series writers have been enjoying them the last couple of nights.
Since catfish was on the menu one night, it had to be ordered, and it was very good, with a light batter and a perfect finish on the fish itself. Speaking of fish, I also tried the red fish fillets, simmered in hot sauce and found them a real winner. The sauce had a splendid tang, with lots of green pepper, celery and tomato to mix with the fish stock for outstanding flavor.
On the simpler side, fried oysters were freshly cooked so that the juicy bivalves, helped by a light batter, were a delightful experience.
The dessert list varies from day to day, but we were able to sample such delights as chocolate pudding cake, apple crisp and rum cake, while passing the bread pudding, which apparently is a standby.


Bobby's Creole Menu, 1980 (click image to enlarge)

Bobby's Creole continued to thrive. In the April 1985 issue of St. Louis Magazine, Whit Crowson wrote, "I visited there recently to help assuage my Creole cravings, and brought a friend who was born and raised in New Orleans, to lend an extra bit of experience to my critical eye – as a matter of fact, she came away feeling a little homesick, much to Bobby’s credit and her husband’s chagrin."


Bobby's Creole Menu, 1985 (click image to enlarge)

However, by the spring of 1985, Bobby's Creole had closed and the Suberis had gone sailing.

* * * * *

One day, Bob and Barbara Suberi were ladling out bowls of okra gumbo and red beans and rice at their restaurant, and the next, the front door was locked, the restaurant was dark and a "closed" sign sat in the window. They had sold their restaurant in pursuit of an 8-year-old dream.

We would call it the 8-year plan, or something like that. Every year we’d push it up one; it was the 5-year, then the 6-year. We were just kind of . . . we were done. We had sold our house and moved into one of the apartments above the restaurant. And we had somebody who was interested in the restaurant. Because when you sell a restaurant, you really don’t put it on the market. You just kind of put your feelers out and do word of mouth.

Riddles was up north and they were looking to get more central, and they approached us and we were able to work something out with them to take it over. It worked out well for us because it gave us some income to sail with, because we had whatever rent they were paying us. Everything looked right, and then we started looking for a boat. It took us about six months to get a boat.

The Suberis' 43-foot racing sloop, Delanie

The Suberis hadn't planned to sail around the world, at least not at first. They spent the first year of their dream in the Caribbean. Then they ran into a group of sailors copying charts for an around-the-world trip. They bought a set and tagged along – and eventually they circumnavigated the globe.

An April 21, 1993 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on the couple's adventure states that "Barbara Suberi joined her husband several times, often for several weeks at a stretch."

It wasn’t just Bob on that boat, I was on that boat too. Since we did have a building back in St. Louis. He would stay on the boat – he took it across the Pacific by himself – and I went back to St. Louis to make sure everything was copasetic.
He was the captain of the boat and he knew a lot about it – where it was going and stuff like that. I was more – not so much the passenger, but the first mate.


Bob Suberi	Barbara Suberi

By 1992, the Suberis had returned to a more mundane life in St. Louis; Bob worked rehabbing houses and Barbara worked as a realtor. But by June of 1996, they were planning a new restaurant.

We found that building. It was such an incredible building. It was ten-thousand square feet, free span. It just needed to have the ceilings dropped. It took us like six, seven months to do it. It was really an amazing feat – it was a lot of work. And then we slowly expanded into the space. It was a great building.

The Suberis "found" and purchased a building in the heart of Maplewood, at the corner of Manchester and Sutton. It had originally housed a Katz Drug Store from 1946 until 1972.

Katz Drug Store, 7401 Manchester at Sutton, 1958

Their new restaurant, which they called simply Bobby's, opened on February 28, 1997. The truncated name was in deference to a menu expanded beyond the traditional Creole dishes offered at their University City restaurant.

Bobby's, 7401 Manchester, 1997

The restaurant's interior was an imaginative recreation of a New Orleans street scene and outdoor cafe. The impression of separate buildings was given by the use of stucco, brick and siding, punctuated by doors, windows and wrought-iron balconies with cascading flowers. In 1999, an all-season, indoor patio was added on the Sutton side of the building.

Bobby's Dining Room, 7401 Manchester

Bobby's Patio, 7401 Manchester

We had a great time with it. All kinds of different people we found to work on it. And then as we got into it, we realized that we had to run the thing.
My real estate business was doing very well. I was just going to come in and for like a month just show somebody how to run the kitchen. That didn’t happen. I had to drop the real estate thing and I was there full time. Bob would have been there running it. As it worked out, I had to be in the kitchen full time. He was front of the house and I was back of the house, and that’s the way it had to be.

Bobby's menu featured a variety of New Orleans-style dishes, but also offered an array of other entrees, including tropical island fare such as Gado Gado, a spicy, vegetarian street-food salad with ground peanuts, vegetables and fish sauce, and Polasami, a mildly spiced, sweet Melanesian stew-like dish with coconut. Both were inspired by dishes sampled on the Suberis' round-the-world sailboat trip.

Big sellers included gumbo, jambalaya, baked oysters, crab cakes, fried catfish, po'boy sandwiches, barbecued shrimp, stuffed chicken, stuffed pork and a pecan-encrusted fish of the day.


Bobby's Creole Menu, circa 2000 (click image to enlarge)

While the prospect of creating a unique environment in an "incredible" building had motivated the Suberis to reopen their restaurant, reality eventually set in.

As you move on you forget. It’s like when somebody passes away, you only remember the good things. Well it’s the same thing with the restaurant. "Remember how good it was? Remember the fun times we had and the great employees?" That’s what was remembered and this building comes in and we had this idea of putting a street scene in there because we could. We could build this incredible thing. It was like doing an artistic installation and we forgot you also had to run a restaurant.

By 2003, Bob and Barbara Suberi had had enough of the restaurant business.

I had had it. He had had it. The workforce had drastically changed . . . and their attitude. We’d come into the restaurant and I never knew what hat I was wearing. Bob was the same. I could be cooking in the back and also bussing tables at the same time because the busser hadn’t shown up or the cook hadn’t shown up. But they’d be there for their paycheck. We looked at each other and said, "I’ve had it. Have you had it?" So we put our feelers out again and the Monarch boys appeared.

The Suberis closed Bobby's in March of 2003 and leased their building to Aaron Teitelbaum, who turned it into Monarch.

We owned the building, so we had two buildings – we had the one on Delmar and we had the one on Manchester – and we had two people who would be paying rent, and we thought, "We’re golden. Let’s get out of there." So we started looking for a place on the water. That’s how we ended up in Alabama.

Barbara and Bob Suberi, Alabama, 2009

The Suberis spent twelve years in Alabama. They bought a blueberry farm in Loxley, which they dubbed Suberi's Blueberries. They bought a sailboat and explored the Caribbean. But, eventually, they returned to St. Louis.

I’m a city girl. I ran out of things to do. I had volunteered for everything. I’m a painter and I was tired of painting crabs and shrimp and fish and beach scenes. I just ran out of things to do and so did Bob, pretty much.

The Suberis' original "Bobby's Creole" sign had hung on their Alabama guest house; it's now in their Affton basement. And they still own the 6307-09 Delmar building in the University City Loop. Perhaps one day they'll again "remember how good it was."

Suberi Alabama Guest House, 2009