Lost Tables: Bob's Seafood

Bob's Seafood

University City's Market in the Loop opened with a grand celebration on March 1, 1975 in the 6600 block of Delmar. More than two dozen applications were received for the fifteen available vendor spaces.

Market in the Loop, March 1, 1975

In 1976, Bob Suberi and Barbara Walters opened a small fish stand at the Market in the Loop. They drove back and forth to New Orleans once a week to procure shrimp, fish, oysters and crab, which they sold from their stand on Saturdays.

In July of 1977, Suberi and Walters opened a restaurant at 6318 Delmar. They called their restaurant Bobby's Creole. About a month later, the couple were married.

In June of 1978, Bob and Barbara Suberi sold their Market in the Loop seafood business, which they had continued to operate along with their restaurant. They sold it to Bob Mepham.

Bob and Barbara Suberi's seafood stand in the U City Loop

Robert Luddington Mepham III was born in St. Louis on December 18, 1946. He graduated from Kirkwood High School in 1964.

Seafood was a regular part of Mepham's diet growing up.

My parents cooked a wide variety of stuff. They never shared lobsters. My dad used to get ‘em but they were for him and my mom. We had shrimp pretty often and oysters.

Mepham worked at various jobs after high school, including Granite City Steel and McDonnell Douglas. He attended the University of South Carolina, where he graduated with a degree in biology.

I tried graduate school and I didn’t do very well. That was the end of it. Then I worked on the river. I was a deck hand.

It was while traveling back and fourth from St. Louis to New Orleans on Mississippi River barges that Mepham got the entrepreneurial bug to sell fish.

When the boat was in New Orleans, the pilot got off and came back with an ice chest full of shrimp. I asked him what he paid for them. He told me and it was worth more than that in St. Louis.

About that time, Mepham met Bob and Barbara Suberi.

I met them here in St. Louis. They were driving to the coast and getting seafood and they were sick of it, so I took it over and it all went from there.

Bob Mepham took over Bob and Barbara Suberi's seafood stand at the Market in the Loop in June of 1978. Not long after, Mepham had his own Barbara as a partner.

Barbara Pommer was born in Starnberg, Germany, just outside of Munich. She arrived in the United States at the age of four on January 19, 1955, settling in Alton, Illinois with her parents and two-year-old brother.

Alton Evening Telegraph, Feb 25, 1955
(click image to enlarge)

An unsuccessful marriage turned Barbara Pommer into Barbara Schaffnit. Bob Mepham was introduced to Barbara Schaffnit by mutual friends, and the two were married on May 24, 1979.

Bob Mepham continued Bob Suberi's weekly trek to Louisiana. He left St. Louis every Wednesday and drove 700 miles to Bayou Lafourche, about 50 miles southwest of New Orleans. While Mepham didn't relish the long drive, he enjoyed the Cajun people and cuisine.

The drive was very taxing, very difficult. It was long. But the people in Louisiana are just . . . I love ‘em. They’re wonderful. I get the biggest kick out of Cajuns.
I did not go into the city very often at all – into New Orleans. I mostly was out in the country, down by Lafourche. Usually, I ate a seafood platter every night that I was down there. I very seldom ate anything else. Every now and then I’d get a good roast beef po boy or red beans and rice somewhere. I loved all the standard Cajun food.

Mepham arrived back in St. Louis on Saturday mornings with a refrigerated truck full of shrimp, fresh crayfish, red snapper, swordfish, live Dungeness crab and more to sell from his stall in the U City Loop.

I brought back a variety of things and kept increasing the variety. I went to 20 different places and picked out the prettiest I could find. Every fish I bought was brought to the dock the prior afternoon. When I got back, I was really tired. We usually sold out everything we brought, or close to it.

Mepham called his burgeoning business Bob's Seafood. He sold to both wholesale and retail customers. He began supplying Bobby's Creole with seafood as soon as he took over the Suberis' outdoor stand. Balaban's and Westwood Country Club were also early wholesale customers.

The Market in the Loop traditionally closed between October and April of each year. The University City Council wanted to see an enclosed, year-round retail venue on the site. In the summer of 1987, plans were sought and developer Dan Wald was chosen for the project.

Construction of the 4,000-square-foot building began in the spring of 1988. By the end of the year, Bob and Barbara Mepham had moved their seafood business from outside to inside into the new 6655 Delmar space.

Dan Wald said he would build a brick-and-mortar building, and so all we had to do is move into it. There were a bunch of businesses in there. We were pretty much told we had to because the city was behind him building the building. We thought it was a step up.

Bob and Barbara Mepham
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept 25, 1989

Mepham made his last trip to Louisiana in 1998. Instead of his weekly drive to handpick seafood for his customers, he began relying on as many as sixty suppliers to fly or truck quality seafood to his door.

It was different. If you buy something from someone and it’s inferior, you don’t buy from them anymore. You call them up and say, hey, you were to send me a #1 tuna and this thing is just so sorry. Send somebody to pick it up. They get the message real quick. They don’t send you junk.

In 2005, Mepham bought a 12,000-square-foot building at 8660 Olive, just east of Interstate 170, and moved Bob's Seafood from the U City Loop to the western outskirts of University City. The new space had walk-in freezers and coolers on-site, a spacious cutting room for processing fish and a greatly expanded retail area.

People could find us! We weren’t so cramped. We had everything in one place. When we were in the Market in the Loop, towards the end, we rented freezer storage across town. We had a second location in Chesterfield. Whatever was needed was always somewhere else. There was a tremendous amount of driving back and forth. It was just getting impossible. We spent a long time looking for another location and one finally turned up.

Bob's Seafood, 8660 Olive Boulevard

By the next decade, over 300 restaurants were using Bob's Seafood as their supplier. Mepham had a few thousand pounds of fish flown to St. Louis every day. Thousands of pounds more arrived each week by truck. On any given day, his showcases displayed tuna, halibut, swordfish, salmon, snapper, grouper, bass, sole, cod, monkfish, tilefish, trout, walleye, char, escolar, wahoo, mahi-mahi, pompano, alligator, turtle, mackerel, sable, skate, shark, scallops, mussels, clams, oysters, frog legs, sea urchin, crab, tilapia, shrimp, lobster, crawfish and caviar.


Bob's Seafood

Along with providing top quality seafood for his customers, Mepham compiled a guide to help them prepare and cook their fish and seafood. He also offered recipes on his website, including a bouillabaisse with lobster, a tomato clam sauce and pickled fish.


Bob Mepham St. Louis Business Journal, 2008	Bob's Seafood Preparation Guide (click image to enlarge)

While Mepham procured fish and dealt with wholesale customers, Barbara was the face of the retail side of the business.

She pretty much did the retail and I stayed away from it because I didn’t want to be changing what she did. She's so much better at dealing with people than I am. She's so good at it. I wound up just mostly in the end trying to collect money from restaurants and pay bills.

Barbara Mepham, 2022

Over the years, the economics of Mepham's business changed significantly.

When I first went to Louisiana, I bought jumbo lump crabmeat for three dollars a pound and got up here and sold it for five. I thought, my god, I’ve got to make money, but I hate to mark something up that much. The last time I bought jumbo lump crabmeat it was nearly forty dollars a pound and I had to charge forty-five for it. And the jumbo lump crabmeat that I buy now is picked in Asia or South America, and back then it was picked by little old Cajun ladies sitting in an air-conditioned room with hairnets on.

In 2018, University City embarked on a $189.4 million development project, ironically called Market at Olive. The massive project, with a Costco as its anchor, engulfed property on either side of Olive Boulevard, west of McKnight Road. In May of 2020, University City filed an eminent domain suit against multiple commercial properties in the area targeted for redevelopment, including Bob's Seafood.

Everybody thinks about retirement at some point. It’s not like you don’t think of it, but we didn’t have any real plans to do it.
We looked all over for another location. For one reason or another, everything else we found was unsatisfactory or would require the outlay of way too much money. Way more money than we could come up with.

In the end, Bob and Barbara Mepham were forced to close their doors. Their last day of business was June 4, 2022.

We had a whole bunch of wonderful people work for us and a bunch of wonderful customers. I’m beginning to realize I’m going to miss being able to just grab some seafood and have it.
I’m going to try to figure out where to go to catch fish. I know where to catch trout. I’d like to go find out a good place to catch crappie.

As for Barbara – retirement allowed her to have a very clean house.

Barbara Mepham, 2022