Clayton's Business Lunch Standby, Priced Like One
Herbie's occupies a specific niche in Clayton dining: the room built for the expense-account lunch and the anniversary dinner rather than for anyone chasing a kitchen with a point of view. New American cooking gives it room to move across a broad menu rather than commit to a single technique or region, which suits a clientele more interested in the table than the plate. No single dish rises to the level of a reason to cross Forsyth for it specifically, and that is the honest read of a menu built for range over identity. What the room does deliver is the infrastructure around the food: outdoor seating for the months Clayton cooperates with it, tables sized and spaced for groups, a service style calibrated for people conducting business or marking an occasion rather than studying the plate. That is a real skill, distinct from cooking, and Herbie's has built its operation around it.
The price sits at the upscale tier without tipping into special-occasion-only territory, which makes it a workable choice for a client dinner on a Tuesday and a birthday on a Saturday alike. Clayton itself explains the rest. This is county fine dining and business-district dining at once, a few blocks from the office towers and the courts that generate the kind of lunch Herbie's is built to host. The room is not chasing the modern chef-driven rooms of Botanical Heights or the Central West End, and it should not be measured against them. It is measured against what a Clayton institution needs to do reliably: seat a party of eight without drama, turn a two-hour lunch meeting, and not embarrass anyone's expense report.
On that standard it holds up. On the standard Sidney Street or the old Tony's set for what a St. Louis kitchen can be at full stretch, there is not enough here, based on the available record, to make the case either way.
