Every float, marching band, and fire truck in Saturday's Brentwood Days parade will pass a 16-stool diner that doesn't take credit cards. That wasn't the original plan. The city changed the route specifically to make it happen.
Brentwood Days is the city's annual festival, held the third weekend of September, and this year's edition lands Friday, September 18 and Saturday, September 19 at the Brentwood Sports Complex. It's the kind of event that doesn't need much explanation if you've lived here more than a summer: carnival rides, a parade, live music, a Saturday night drone show closing things out. What's different in 2026 is the theme, "Get Your Kicks on Route 66," and the small logistical decision it produced. The city rerouted this year's parade so it passes directly by Carl's Drive-In at 9033 Manchester Road, a business the city itself describes as the only one in Brentwood still operating in its original location from the Route 66 era.
The One Business the City Didn't Touch
Manchester Road has changed shape more than once since Route 66 ran along it. The alignment through Brentwood only lasted from 1926 to 1932 before the highway shifted south, and most of what stood along that stretch in the early automobile era is long gone. Carl's Drive-In is the exception, and its survival has less to do with sentiment than with never becoming anything worth demolishing.
The building started as a Lubrite service station in 1918. In 1943 it became a hot dog stand called the Foot Long Hot Dog Company. By the 1950s it was Walter Breeden's Good Food Drive Inn. A tornado tore through in 1959, and rather than close, Breeden sold the damaged building to a 25-year-old named Carl Meyer, who rebuilt it with his wife Pat and gave it the name it still carries. Curb service and a walk-up window came first. Indoor seating, all 16 stools of it, arrived in a 1962 remodel that also added air conditioning. The place has changed hands three times since Meyer, most recently in 2021 when David Kraemer bought it after years of eating there several times a week as a Kirkwood resident.
What hasn't changed is the menu, the cash-only register, and the root beer, made from a recipe Carl's still uses and one that reportedly served as the basis for the nationally distributed IBC brand. In 2022, Yelp reviewers named Carl's the best cheeseburger in Missouri. On Tripadvisor it currently holds a 4.4 rating and sits at #174 out of nearly 2,000 restaurants across the entire city of St. Louis, a notable ranking for a building with eight stools on each side of the grill.
the only Brentwood business still operating in its original location from that Route 66 era
That's how the city's own announcement describes it, and it's the reason a modern festival built around drone shows and craft cocktails is routing its 2026 parade past a diner that has resisted every renovation trend since the Eisenhower administration.
What's Actually Happening This Weekend
If you're planning your Friday and Saturday, here's what's on the calendar beyond the parade:
- Saturday's parade steps off at noon and now runs past Carl's Drive-In as part of the Route 66 theme
- Carnival rides open after the parade and run through the evening, with wristbands available in advance for Brentwood residents and Brentwood School District and St. Mary Magdalen students and staff
- A drone show closes out Saturday night, replacing what used to be a fireworks finale
- The inaugural Cocktail Showdown is new this year, open to local mixologists, home bartenders, and two-person teams, with a People's Choice vote decided by festivalgoers sampling from the Biergarten
- A Route 66 trivia contest runs through the weekend for anyone who wants to test what they actually know about the Mother Road
The usual rules apply: no coolers, no dogs, bags subject to search. Residents picking up wristbands at the Brentwood Community Center need proof of residency, like an occupancy permit or a utility bill, and teachers need a pay stub.
A City Mid-Rebuild, Choosing to Slow Down for One Block
None of this happens in a vacuum. Brentwood has spent the better part of a decade remaking itself. The city finished a destination playground at Brentwood Park, built a connector to the Great Rivers Greenway trail network along Deer Creek, and this July broke ground on a new KinderCare Learning Center near Porter Avenue that will serve 140 kids. The Manchester Road corridor itself has been the subject of a long-running redevelopment plan aimed at fixing decades of Deer Creek flooding while opening the door to new retail, office, and residential construction. Brentwood is not a place standing still.
Which is what makes this year's parade detour worth noticing. A city actively reshaping its commercial corridor chose, for its biggest annual event, to build the route around the one place that never got reshaped at all. Carl's isn't a plaque or a preserved facade behind glass. It's a working diner that still won't take your card and still fries burgers the way Frank Cunetto taught the crew to do it decades ago. Routing a parade past it isn't nostalgia marketing. It's an acknowledgment that continuity is its own kind of civic asset, one that doesn't show up in a redevelopment plan but shows up in a 4.4-star rating and a line of regulars who've been coming since before the tornado.
If you're heading to Brentwood Days this weekend, the parade route is worth watching for exactly that reason. It's not just a nod to history. It's the city admitting, in its own quiet way, that some things are worth building a detour around.
Brentwood keeps changing, and most of that change is worth watching too. If you're ever curious what any of it means for your own street, your own lot, or a property you've had your eye on, The Realty Shop is always glad to talk it through.
