In 2023, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic put an Edwardsville restaurant on the STL 100, the paper's list of the region's best places to eat. By February 2024, that restaurant was gone. The corner where it sat had promised a lot when it opened. What it actually proved, four years on, has nothing to do with the restaurant that got the headlines.
If you live anywhere near Governors' Parkway and Route 157, you already drive past The Parkway more than you think about it. This is the part nobody tells you when they list what's currently open.
The Corner That Was Supposed to Be Something
The development goes by two names depending on who you ask. Trace on the Parkway is the residential side, the apartment buildings. The Parkway is the commercial strip wrapped around it. Both sit on 26 acres at the intersection of Governors' Parkway and Illinois Route 157, built by Plocher Construction, the same locally owned firm behind The Blade, the Chuck Fruit Aquatic Center, and Park Street Plaza. It's a $50 million project on land that used to be the Madison Mutual Insurance Company headquarters, directly across the road from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and next door to Edwardsville High School.
The name is a small piece of local trivia worth knowing. Trace refers to the Edwards Trace, the historic route that once ran from Kaskaskia up toward Peoria. Both the trail and the city of Edwardsville were named for Ninian Edwards, the Illinois territory's only governor and later a U.S. senator. The development borrowed the name on purpose.
By mid-2021, the apartment side had 114 units leased, with a third residential building already on the drawing board and expected to open in early 2023. The retail side already had Goshen Coffee open a year, along with Doc's Smokehouse, Willow & Mohr Photography, Kloss Furniture, Boheme Boutique, Rocket Bowls, Sunflower Dentistry, and Alliance Chiropractic and Performance. More was coming. Salon Ludic, a Paul Mitchell focus salon, signed on. So did Drunken Fish and Kimchi Guys, planned for an outlot across from the apartments.
And so did the restaurant everyone in Edwardsville still brings up.
The Restaurant Everyone Remembers
Michael Del Pietro had run Sugo's Spaghetteria in Edwardsville for seven years before he signed a lease for a 3,000-square-foot space at The Parkway. Every restaurant he'd built up to that point was Italian. This one wasn't going to be. He named it Blue Violet, after the state flower, and put Micah Hopkin, who had managed Sugo's in Edwardsville for nine years, in as general manager. Chef Jordan Knight, from Del Pietro's Il Palato in Clayton, built a menu that pulled from the American South, Latin America, and Asia instead of Italy. One dish braised pork belly in cola and coffee, using beans roasted next door at Goshen Coffee.
Blue Violet opened in May 2022. It was good enough that a Post-Dispatch critic called it one of the best new restaurants that year and put it on the 2023 STL 100.
By February 2024, it was closed. Not quite two years after it opened.
"Just didn't make it," Del Pietro told the Post-Dispatch when the news broke.
He didn't leave Edwardsville. His Sugo's Spaghetteria, the original one on Harvard Drive that predates The Parkway by years, is still running. So is his footprint across the river: Sugo's in Frontenac, Babbo's in Chesterfield, Il Palato in Clayton, Del Pietro's in Richmond Heights. Blue Violet was the one experiment that didn't hold, at the one address that was supposed to be the showcase.
What Never Left
Here's the part that actually matters if you're deciding where to grab lunch on a Tuesday instead of reading a restaurant obituary. The businesses that opened quietly in 2020 and 2021, without a magazine feature, are mostly still there:
- Doc's Smokehouse, the counter-service barbecue spot that moved into a larger Parkway space back in 2021 after outgrowing its old location across the street
- Kloss Furniture, the roughly 40,000-square-foot anchor store that's been part of the property since the early buildout
- Goshen Coffee, still roasting and still the coffee behind at least one dish that outlived the restaurant it was made for
- Sauce on the Side, the calzone concept currently running out of a Trace Parkway Drive storefront
None of these are the story a food writer would pitch. That's the point. The Parkway's actual survivors are counter-service, walk-in, order-at-the-register places. The one concept built around a critic's approval and a tasting menu sensibility was also the one that didn't make the two-year mark. If you're trying to figure out what's reliably open on a random Wednesday rather than what got written up, the boring answer has been the correct one since 2021.
The Part the Yelp Reviews Skip
Every review of The Parkway mentions the food. Almost none mention that you don't need a car to get there.
The property sits directly against the Madison County Transit Trail system, the paved bike and walking network that laces through Edwardsville and connects out toward Glen Carbon and the rest of the Metro East. If you're already on the trail, whether you started downtown or came from a neighborhood a few miles out, The Parkway is a stop you can reach on foot or by bike without ever touching the Route 157 parking lots.
That matters more here than it would somewhere else, because of who's next door. SIUE has close to 14,000 students, and Edwardsville High School has about 4,000 more, both within easy walking distance. That's a lot of people whose daily routine already runs through this corner without a car involved. It explains why the coffee shop and the bowl place have stuck around even as the fine-dining concept came and went. The customer base was never really about who could get a reservation. It was about who could walk over between classes.
A Loop That Doesn't Require a Second Parking Spot
If you've never actually walked the property instead of just driving in for one errand, here's what that looks like in practice:
- Start at Goshen Coffee for something to drink while you walk
- Cut through Kloss Furniture if you want to browse, no purchase required to wander
- Pick up lunch at Doc's Smokehouse, order at the counter, eat outside if the weather's decent
- Walk the MCT trail spur behind the property for twenty minutes before doubling back
- End at Sauce on the Side or the Harvard Drive Sugo's, depending on which side of town you're heading home to
None of this requires moving your car once you've parked it the first time, which is the actual value proposition of a development like this one, more than any single tenant.
What Four Years Actually Prove
The lesson from The Parkway isn't that Edwardsville lost a great restaurant. Restaurants close everywhere, including good ones. The lesson is that a development built to bring foot traffic to Route 157 succeeded at exactly that, even while its most acclaimed tenant failed. The barbecue counter, the coffee roaster, and the furniture store did the quiet work of turning a former insurance office parking lot into a place people actually walk to. Blue Violet did the loud work of getting Edwardsville into a St. Louis magazine, and then it closed anyway.
If you're already walking or biking that stretch of trail on a Saturday, you've probably worked most of this out on your own. If you haven't been out there since before 2024, the lineup has changed more than you'd guess, and not in the direction the reviews would suggest.
Edwardsville keeps adding corners like this one, and keeping track of which ones actually stick is half the fun of living here. If you're curious about what else is shifting around town, or you're thinking through a move within Edwardsville and want someone who actually knows which strip malls have staying power, Toni Lucas is a good person to call. Let's Connect.
