54th Street Grill Prices a Sit Down Lunch Competitively Against St. Louis Bread Co.

The 54th Street Grill is a Missouri chain that started in Kansas City and spread to St. Louis.

While it’s nice to feel patriotic toward a Missouri chain restaurant, the menu and interior still feel familiar to anyone who has been in a TGI Friday's, Applebee's or Max and Erma's. Every square inch of wall space is decorated with a combination of movie, NASCAR and beer-themed posters.

The visually diverse atmosphere makes it a popular place for families with small children. When I visited, the crowded dining room was packed with toddlers and babies. Relieved parents enjoyed a few minutes of grown-up conversation while the little ones enjoyed plenty of distracting visual stimuli.

The menu fits the standard chain restaurant formula with an assortment of salads and sandwiches hovering between $9-10, a short selection of Mexican food for $9-11, steaks from $12-17 and some pasta and seafood entrées around $12. If you can’t make up your mind, dinner combos are around $15.

Lunch, on the other hand, is far more affordable. There’s an Olive Garden style all-you-can-eat-soup-and-salad bar for $6.99 (although the 54th Street Grill charges an extra $2 if you want to add on bread.)

You can also get a burger, grilled chicken sandwich, tacos or half-sized taco salad or chicken salad. I chose the soup-and-salad combo with a half-sized brisket sandwich and a bowl of the homemade vegetable soup, plus an extra house salad on the side.

I am not a fan of the restaurant's oversized bowls. The wide, flat, improbably thick bottomed stoneware dishes were deceptively shallow. What looked like a vast bowl of soup or salad turned out to actually be about one inch of soup floating over two inches of ceramics. 

The house salad was a large bowl of nicely crisp mixed greens topped with a scant one-quarter wedge of hard-boiled egg and two thin slices each of cucumber and tomato, plus a handful of croutons. However, the well rinsed, earthy greens were crisp and fresh, something of a rarity at a chain. The dark cherry vinaigrette dressing was a nice variation on the usual raspberry vinaigrette. I liked the darker, earthier tone balancing out the sweetness.

54th Street Grill’s light vegetable soup was surprisingly good. The hearty vegetable broth tasted of oregano and thyme with a nice background kick of spicy heat. Fire-roasted red peppers, green chilis, corn and onions provided a backdrop to large slices of celery and zucchini.

It’s rare a soup designed to appeal to dieters is actually this good. Sadly, the heavy bottomed, flat, shallow bowl made it nearly impossible to eat without tipping the bowl on its side and risking major spillage.

I was pleasantly surprised by the sight of my brisket. I grew up in Oklahoma, where we take our barbecue seriously. St. Louis hasn’t always lived up to my hopes, so I didn't expect a Missouril chain with regional ambitions to serve up lean slices brisket with a beautiful, thick pink smoke ring.

I pulled a slice out to sample on its own before biting into my sandwich. The tender brisket melted in my mouth, leaving me with the mingled flavors of a salty brine and a rich background of smoke. Considering where the chain is based, it was naturally served with a sweet Kansas City style barbecue sauce.

While I was very pleased with the meat, I wasn’t a fan of the cibatta bun. It was dense and toothsome enough to hold up to a heavy dose of barbecue sauce without falling apart, but it was so heavy and solid a bite made it almost impossible to taste the brisket.

The sandwich was piled high with an almost comical amount of lettuce and a thick slice of tomato. Biting into the whole, I couldn't taste the beef at all. I gradually dissected my sandwich until I was left with an open faced bun topped with meat and sauce. The lettuce was crisp, the tomato juicy and the brisket surprisingly good, but this sandwich was in serious need of a better bun.

If you leave off the croutons, the $6.99 soup-and-salad combination is one of the most flavorful very low-calorie meals I've ever seen in a restaurant. However, if you're hungry, the shallow bowls of food will leave you unsatisfied. The half-sized sandwich and soup provided a much more substantial lunch even though the sandwich fillings were almost impossible to taste past the dense bread.

The sandwich-and-soup combination was priced competitively with St. Louis Bread Company. If you’re looking for a variation in your lunch routine and don’t need WI-FI, this is well worth checking out.

You can certainly get in and out quickly at lunch time. My service felt incredibly rushed. The waitress clearly expected me to know what I wanted to eat as soon as I sat down. I asked for my salad to come out before my soup and sandwich, so the soup and meat wouldn’t go cold while I ate my greens, but all three came out together.

Whenever I took more than a couple bites from any part of my lunch, she wanted to take away the half-full bowl. Ironically, when I did finish, I had a surprisingly long wait for my check. However, in her favor, she kept my iced tea refilled and offered to bring me an iced tea in a to-go cup with my check.

The total for a sandwich, soup, salad and iced tea came to $12.70 plus a $3 tip. This was a good variation on chain food with pleasantly tasty light alternatives and affordable options in the same price range as the St. Louis Bread Company.

I left with overall mixed feelings. Great brisket, bad bread; tasty greens, token salad toppings; good soup, terrible bowls. Better service could’ve swayed me toward a somewhat better grade. Under the circumstances, I give the 54th Street Grill a B-.