The Creole food truck the Crooked Boot has opened a new brick-and-mortar storefront at 2012 Campus Drive in St. Charles. The restaurant debuted last week, just in time for king-cake beignets and other Mardi Gras specials that continue today (March 1).
Chef and owner Coria Griggs tells Off the Menu the location by the Zumbehl Road exit from Interstate 70 was appealing for the area’s busy traffic. In fact, she says, “I can see the highway from my location.”
(Griggs previously operated a space in O’Fallon, Missouri, that was a hub for the Crooked Boot’s online store and hosted occasional crawfish boils. It was last open to the public in March 2020.)
The restaurant is takeout-focused, thought it does offer a few counter seats along its front window. The menu features dishes that have become Crooked Boot staples since Griggs founded her truck in 2016: po’boy sandwiches with catfish (grilled or fried) or shrimp (blackened or fried); seafood gumbo either by itself or atop cheddar-cheese fries; the Savage Crabwich, a fried soft-shell crab on a pretzel bun.
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The Crooked Boot food truck in September 2020 at 9 Mile Garden
A native of Monroe, Louisiana, Griggs cooked as a hobby while working in office jobs in St. Louis. Tired of the corporate life, she attended culinary school, worked in restaurants and became “obsessed” with food trucks.
“And then one day I just got a truck,” she said in a September 2020 Post-Dispatch profile. “And then when I got the truck, I had it (parked) for like six months because I was scared.”
The Crooked Boot’s menu has expanded over the past year to include a few Haitian dishes, including akra (fritters) served with pikliz (pickled vegetables) and hot sauce and the Ayiti Bowl, with rice, red beans, chicken, pikliz and plantains. Griggs plans to add more Haitian dishes after Mardi Gras.
Griggs says she has always felt a connection to Haiti through her Louisiana upbringing. In the past year alone, she has visited the Caribbean nation three times. Every time she has gone, she says, it has felt like home: “The people are very welcoming. The food is amazing — like, amazing.”
The Crooked Boot will also continue to operate its food truck. Griggs says the truck will resume its regular visits to Point Labaddie Brewery in Labaddie, and it will be a part of the inaugural roster for Frankie Martin’s Garden, the 9 Mile Garden spinoff scheduled to open this spring in Cottleville.
The brick-and-mortar Crooked Boot is open 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. The phone number is 636-757-3305.
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