A Second Run of Paint Louis

Depending on your sense of adventure, you can easily find restaurants and coffee shops in St. Louis that cater, almost exclusively, to a non-English-speaking clientele. Mostly, you’ll hear languages like Vietnamese, Spanish and Bosnian, though those aren’t the only ones, not by a long shot. Listen closely and you can detect a bit of Chinese, Somali, or even Albanian on your journeys.

And while it might be hard for newcomers to imagine, German was the language of choice at all sorts of mom-and-pop businesses, especially in South St. Louis, where the cultural elements of the old country hung on for decades. As recently as the early ‘90s, German-owned bakeries, knick-knick shops and restaurants were dotted through the City’s South Side and the spaces they left behind are reminders of how cities constantly repurpose the immediate past.