Drive Big Bend past Old Orchard on a Tuesday afternoon and you will pass a scaffold. Turn left onto Lockwood a few minutes later and you will pass a bank lobby where a wine list used to be. Webster Groves is having two different years right now, and the split is not random. It follows the difference between a business investing in the next decade and one working out how to leave.
Most roundups of "what's new in Webster Groves" treat every storefront the same: a list of openings, a list of closings, done. That misses the pattern. Old Orchard is absorbing new tenants and permanent investment. Old Webster is mid-turnover, with a legacy restaurant gone and a different kind of business filling the space. Once you see the split, you start noticing which block will be busier at 7 p.m. this fall and which one will be busier at 9 a.m.
What's Landing in Old Orchard
The clearest evidence sits at 8169 Big Bend Boulevard, the former home of Weber's Front Row. DD Mau, the fast-casual Vietnamese restaurant that outgrew its longtime spot on Allen Avenue, opened its new location there on Friday, November 21, 2025, after a soft opening the night before. Owner Julie Truong Shih and her husband Andrew didn't just relocate. They roughly tripled their footprint, moving into a 6,000-square-foot space with room for 150 diners, a larger kitchen, and an events area the old storefront never had. That last detail matters more than it sounds. A restaurant with a private events room can host graduation lunches, office parties, and rehearsal dinners it used to have to turn away.
Demolition turned up something the Shihs didn't plan for: an exposed brick wall along the east side of the dining room, buried for decades under drywall and drop ceilings. It's now a permanent design feature instead of a demolition surprise, and it's a small reminder of what Old Orchard's one-story brick buildings tend to hide.
A block and a half east, Old Orchard is getting a second kind of permanent investment, and this one you can't miss from the street. Webster Groves native and street artist Peat "Eyez" Wollaeger is painting a large-scale bald eagle mural on the southwestern wall of the Climate Masters building at 8027 Big Bend Boulevard, approved by Climate Masters founder and owner Tom Becker. Wollaeger is a Webster Groves High School graduate whose stencil-and-mural work already shows up around the region, so this isn't an outside artist parachuting in for a commission. It's a hometown signature going up on a building that's stood on that corner for years.
None of this replaces the district's actual constant, the free Friday-night concerts at Gazebo Park. The current run of six evenings continues into late September at Big Bend and South Old Orchard, and it's the closest thing the district has to a standing weekly ritual. Bring a chair, grab carryout from whichever Old Orchard kitchen is open that night, and you've got the same evening residents have had for years, just with a new mural overhead and a new restaurant a few doors down.
What's Changing on Lockwood
Old Webster's story this year is not addition. It's substitution, and the substitution is instructive.
Robust Bistro & Wine Bar closed its doors at 227 W. Lockwood Avenue on January 31, 2026, ending an 18-year run that started in 2007. The closure followed a lawsuit filed the previous October by the building's landlord, McCallum Group, alleging the restaurant was more than $84,000 behind on rent. Co-owner Stanley Browne told St. Louis Magazine that 2025 had been a rough year for the business well before the lawsuit landed:
"We had a great December in 2024, but 2025 brought repeated weather-related slowdowns, cold, snow, a delayed patio season, then a heat wave. The first half of the year was rough, and the second half didn't make up for it."
At the time of the closure, a sale to the restaurant's longtime executive chef, Zach Dale, and his wife Kelcey, was still being negotiated, according to KSDK. If that sale went through, 227 W. Lockwood stays a restaurant under new ownership. If it didn't, Old Webster has a real vacancy question on one of its longest-held storefronts for the first time in nearly two decades.
A few doors up the same stretch, one storefront question already has an answer. Central Bank opened its eighteenth full-service location in the St. Louis metro area at 220 W. Lockwood Avenue, a lobby with extended-hours video teller service instead of another kitchen. A bank branch is not a competing restaurant, and it's not trying to be. It's a tenant that signs a long lease, keeps consistent daytime hours, and draws a different kind of foot traffic than a dinner reservation does. That's a small, boring fact with a real effect: that block of Lockwood gets busier mid-morning and depends on what eventually fills 227 for its evening traffic.
Here's the pattern in one place:
| Old Orchard (Big Bend) | Old Webster (Lockwood) | |
|---|---|---|
| Recent move | DD Mau triples its footprint at 8169 Big Bend | Robust Bistro closes after 18 years at 227 W. Lockwood |
| New tenant type | Expanded restaurant with events space | Bank branch with daytime lobby hours |
| Permanent addition | Wollaeger mural on Climate Masters building | Open question, pending Robust's sale |
| What it signals | Investment in evening foot traffic | A daytime anchor replacing a nighttime one |
If you live within walking distance of either strip, that table is more useful than any single opening or closing on its own. It tells you where the evening crowd is headed and where the block is still figuring itself out.
The One Date That Doesn't Move
Regardless of which storefronts are open in September, one thing on the calendar isn't in question. The Old Webster Jazz & Blues Festival returns on Saturday, September 19, 2026, running from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. across two stages in the historic district. It's a free event that has grown to well over 12,000 annual attendees since it started in 2001, and it's still organized by the same community group that's run it for two decades. Whatever storefronts line Lockwood by then, the festival happens in the streets around them regardless.
That's worth sitting with for a second. The storefronts churn. The free calendar doesn't. Community Days, the Gazebo series, and the jazz festival are the fixed points that don't depend on which restaurant is leasing which building this year. If you're trying to read what's actually changing in Webster Groves versus what just feels like change because a familiar sign came down, the calendar is your control group.
What To Actually Do With This
If you haven't been to the new DD Mau, the events space is worth seeing even if you're not booking it, and the exposed brick is a nice reminder of what's hiding under half the buildings on Big Bend. If you drive Lockwood on your commute, keep an eye on 227 W. Lockwood. Whether that address reopened as a restaurant under the Dales or turned over to something else will tell you more about which direction Old Webster's dinner traffic flows than anything else on that street this year. And put September 19 on the calendar regardless of what else is going on. Some things about this town don't need an update.
We watch these blocks closely because they're the same ones our clients ask about, whether they're weighing a move into Webster Groves or trying to understand what their own street is becoming. If you ever want an honest, unhurried read on what a specific corner of this town is actually doing, The Realty Shop is a good place to start that conversation.
