Irene and I made our way down to the newest Amalgamated Brewing venture, The Stable, for Saturday night’s grand opening. I’ve been to a few grand openings as of recent and for the most part they’re usually low-key events. The opening of The Stable was anything but. We walked in and the place was packed, filled to the brim with people either waiting to get a beer or waiting to get a table.

The Stable
1821 Cherokee Street (Map It)
St Louis, MO 63118
(314) 771-8500

Beer

If The Stable doesn’t win some sort of award next year for best beer selection in a restaurant in one of the local magazines, I may just have to give up hope for this town. The devotion to beer that everyone involved with The Stable has is just mindblowing. With over 20 hand-picked draught choices and another 15 in bottles, The Stable proves that having the largest selection doesn’t necessary mean you have the best selection. Two other extremely encouraging tidbits I picked up was that this will be a rotating selection, so that beer you had on your first visit may not be there on the second. Also, they’ve made the promise that you’ll see no beer with the word “Light” in the name.

Food:

Not content with just pizza and beer, The Stable offers a full line of sandwiches and also some interesting starters. I had the steak special and Irene tried the cajun carbonara. While my steak was cooked perfectly to temperature, I found it a bit tough and not very moist. But I was in the mood for beef so it satisfied my craving. Irene’s carbonara was the winning dish between our two. The spiciness of the andouille helped to balance the richness of the cream sauce. The pasta itself was also very well received as it still had a bit of chew to the noodles, almost just shy of al dente.

Intangibles:

This place is pretty gorgeous. If you’ve ever been to the Lemp Mansion you’ll know that it’s almost like stepping back in time to when the mansion was full of Lemps. The Stable does a good job of taking a lot of the feel from the Lemp Mansion and continuing it in this new spot. The updated wood features along with some of the other features keeps you in a very particular mindset. Irene couldn’t stop looking around and saying “wow.” They also feature a “patio” area featuring a second bar which seems less finished and much more sparse. I’ll be interested to see if it gets updated as well.

I’m really excited about the future of The Stable, some time to work out some opening kinks I think it could quickly become the best beer restaurant in St. Louis. Let’s hope that the crowds I saw on opening night think the same as me and keep filling the place up.

I would have liked to get these photos up on Wednesday, but there was no way that was happening after the night we had. I didn’t end up getting home until 11:30PM and 6:00AM was awfully early yesterday morning. But I did remember to pull the photos off the camera this morning and so I thought I’d share them with everyone who couldn’t attend.

First of all, I want to thank Doug and Mike Mattingly for letting us invade their restaurant, they provided a great place for us to hang out, eat some pizza and drink some great beer. If you haven’t been out to Mattingly’s yet, get the Corsica pizza, it’s just awesome. Thanks also to Drew for providing a sampling of some of his awesome homebrew, it just gets us all the more excited when he’s finally able to get brewing some of his own beer.

And finally, thank you to everyone who showed up for this event. We’ll have one of these again soon, promise.