Ribs and Chips Anchor Midtown Room
The Fountain on Locust runs on a straightforward promise: fall-apart ribs, a snack plate called billy goat chips, and a sandwich called the Royal Grill that regulars order without needing the menu. That is the case for a lot of St. Louis barbecue rooms, but this one earns its reputation with first-time visitors who arrive expecting hype and leave saying the ribs delivered on it. The rack comes off the bone clean, which is the baseline test for any St.
Louis-cut spare rib and one this kitchen passes consistently enough that out-of-towners specifically cite it. The billy goat chips function as the room's calling card beyond the meat, a shareable starter that shows up in the same breath as the Royal Grill in most orders, suggesting a kitchen that wants the table to eat two things at once rather than picking one lane. The Royal Grill itself reads as the sandwich to get if there is only one order to make, paired often with the chips as the default combination the room has settled into. Service gets specific credit here too: the staff apparently pays real attention to gluten-free requests, which matters in a genre where breading and sauce bases can trip up a kitchen that isn't paying attention.
That kind of care, on top of the barbecue fundamentals, is why regulars come back on a rotation and then wonder why the rotation isn't tighter. The room reads as group-friendly and casual, the kind of place that absorbs a table of six as easily as a solo counter seat, and the moderate pricing keeps it in range for a casual dinner rather than an occasion. This is not a smokehouse chasing a national reputation; it is a St. Louis room doing pork-forward barbecue at a level that holds up against the ribs, pork steaks, and snoots that define the city's canon, and doing it with a side dish distinctive enough to remember by name.
