Exciting Events and Activities in St. Louis
The Last Free Wednesday At Creve Coeur Park, And Three New Places To Eat On The Way There
Exciting Events and Activities in St. Louis
Everyone in Creve Coeur has heard about the lantern festival. It's on the calendar, it's on the lake, and it happens once. Fewer people have noticed that the better version of that same evening, a free concert with a line of food trucks and grass to sit on, has been running at the same park all summer and gets exactly one more date before it disappears until next May.
That's the actual story of Labor Day week here. Not a single event, but a short window where a recurring free program, a ticketed one-off, and a run of new restaurant openings all land within a few miles and a few days of each other. If you live in Creve Coeur or Ladue, this is the stretch where you get to choose which version of late summer you want, and it helps to know both are on the table before you commit a Saturday to one of them.
The city's restaurant map moved more this year than a casual glance at Olive Boulevard would suggest.
The most recent addition is Dewey's Pizza, which opened this month at 736 N. New Ballas Road inside Creve Coeur Plaza, in the spot that used to hold the Fantasy Shop. The Creve Coeur City Council signed off on the move in a unanimous vote at its January 26 meeting, and by early August the location was open and getting its first round of reviews, with regulars noting it was still in its opening week. The format here is a departure from a typical sit-down Dewey's: you order at the counter and staff bring the food to your table, with no traditional table service, and the indoor seating was trimmed to 16 seats from an originally planned 22 because of limited parking on the lot.
A few minutes away on N. Mason Road, The Mexican Barrel House has had more time to settle in. Owner Alfredo Flores spent four years turning the old Houlihan's building into an 8,700-square-foot restaurant with 280 seats, and it held its grand opening on February 16. Flores is a familiar name in St. Louis Mexican food circles, with Casa Juarez and four Las Fuentes locations already under his family's operation, plus Oats & Honey Café, which opened in Creve Coeur back in 2024. By Labor Day, the Barrel House is six months in, past the soft-opening kinks and settled into regular service, which makes it a useful contrast to Dewey's brand-new status just up the road.
The same January council meeting that approved Dewey's also cleared Einstein Bros. Bagels for Heritage Place Shopping Center at 12505 Olive Blvd., in the far northern edge of the city limits. That one hasn't opened its doors yet as of this writing, so treat it as a spot to watch rather than a stop to make this weekend.
Taken together, what opened this year in Creve Coeur skews toward counter-service and casual formats rather than anything requiring a reservation. That's worth knowing if your mental map of the area still assumes the same lineup it had a year ago.
St. Louis County Parks and Recreation runs a series called Feast in the Park at Creve Coeur Park on the fourth Wednesday of the month from May through September, with a fifth-Wednesday exception in July. Each date pairs a free concert, running 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., with a rotating caravan of food trucks parked along the lawn.
This year's lineup ran through Soulard Blues Band on May 27, Off the Shoulder on June 24, the Steve Ewing Duo on July 29, and Scott Laytham & Karl "Tricky Holmes" on August 26, which has already come and gone. That leaves one date on the calendar: September 23, closing out the season with Water Taxi.
If you've never gone, the appeal isn't the production value. It's that you can show up with a folding chair, buy dinner from whichever truck has the shortest line, and leave whenever the kids get restless, all without having bought anything in advance.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A free, recurring, no-ticket event is a different kind of commitment than a festival you plan a week around. For a lot of residents, the Wednesday series has quietly become the more reliable plan precisely because it asks nothing of you upfront.
The Water Lantern Festival lands at Creve Coeur Park on September 5, ahead of the last Feast in the Park date, and it's built for a different kind of evening. Gates open at 4:30 p.m., with food trucks and music running through 8:30. At 7 p.m. attendees design their own lanterns, and the launch onto the lake runs from 7:30 to 8:30. It's a genuinely nice visual, water lit up with floating lanterns at dusk, and it's the kind of evening built around that single moment rather than around repeat visits.
The difference from the Wednesday series is that this one requires a ticket bought in advance, the way most touring lantern festival brands operate nationally. That's not a knock on it. It's simply a different transaction: you're paying for a specific, photograph-worthy moment rather than a low-key weeknight with your neighbors. Both are legitimate ways to spend an evening at the same park. They're just not the same evening.
If you're mapping out the next few weeks, here's a sequence that uses everything above without wasting a trip:
None of this requires a decision about where you live or where you're moving. It requires knowing that the calendar this particular week happens to stack a free option, a paid option, and a short run of new restaurants closer together than usual, and that the free one has an expiration date most people don't notice until it's already passed.
If you're the kind of person who tracks this level of detail about your own neighborhood, that instinct tends to be useful for more than picking a Wednesday plan. When the time comes to think about what a home in Creve Coeur or Ladue is actually worth, or what's changing block by block, Svoboda Shell pays attention to the same kind of detail for a living. Start your home journey with Svoboda Shell whenever that day comes.