About Top of St. Louis.

The same handful of marquee rooms with publicists get covered to exhaustion, while the neighborhood spots locals drive across town for on a Tuesday night stay buried under sponsored listings on the platforms most people search.

Most national coverage of this city stops at Provel jokes and toasted ravioli punchlines, then moves on. That leaves out the real map: Cunetto's and Gioia's on The Hill, cevapi in Bevo Mill and south county, the country-by-country storefronts along South Grand, Cherokee Street's taquerias, the chop suey counters that gave the city the St. Paul sandwich. St. Louis City and St. Louis County are different governments with different restaurants, and Clayton is not St. Louis any more than Webster Groves is. We built this guide because the food that actually defines this metro deserves to be covered straight, by name, by neighborhood, with no apology in its mouth.

We track the city and the county as the separate geographies locals know them to be, plus Clayton, Maplewood, Webster Groves, the Delmar Loop, and Metro East towns like Belleville and Edwardsville, each named as its own place. That means The Hill's Italian institutions, north-side and East St. Louis barbecue traditions including snoots and rib tips, Bosnian grills, South Grand's Vietnamese and Ethiopian kitchens, Cherokee Street's Mexican corridor, gooey butter bakeries, and the chef-driven tier clustering in Botanical Heights and the Central West End. Strip malls and corner storefronts count as fully as any dining room. We track 0+ restaurants across the metro against the same methodology; the full method is laid out at How We Work.

Top of St. Louis is published by Top Rated Network LLC, an independent, veteran-owned Las Vegas media company that runs city dining guides on the same methodology across the country. The rankings and the writing are produced by this site’s own desk.

The site is small by design. No investors, no growth pressure, no quarterly board meeting that needs engagement numbers to keep climbing. The rankings answer to the data; the data answers to the city.

The methodology (Bayesian-weighted ratings, weekly recalculation) is the same one Top Rated Network uses across its other city guides. The editorial voice is local to St. Louis. The sites themselves are built and maintained by WebIgniter, our in-house web studio.