5 Restaurant Chains Missouri Misses That Never Came Back

For ninety-nine years, Garavelli’s carved roast beef to order for St. Louis lunch crowds.

Then, in the summer of 2013, Garavelli’s turned off its ovens for good.

It wasn’t the only one.

These are the restaurant chains Missouri misses that never came back.

1. Forum Cafeterias

The Forum Cafeterias chain started as a single ground-floor lunchroom that founder Clarence Hayman opened on Grand Avenue in Kansas City in 1918.

The chain grew fast, with locations that stretched from Kansas City and St. Louis to Oklahoma City by the late 1920s.

The flagship at 1212 Main Street ran for 57 years before it closed in 1977.

The suburban mall locations that outlasted it faded through the 1990s, as shoppers drifted toward food courts instead.

By 1950, according to one historical account, Forum Cafeterias was serving more than 17.5 million meals a year.

That was seventeen and a half million meals in a single year, from a chain few Missourians remember by name today.

Yet Forum Cafeterias still shows up in Kansas City’s public history record.

The Clio, a nonprofit that catalogs historic sites for modern visitors, added an entry on the chain’s flagship location in 2025.

Nobody has been able to sit down at a Forum Cafeteria tray line since.

2. Garavelli’s

Garavelli’s opened its first St. Louis location in 1914, when Joe Garavelli started serving carved roast beef and cafeteria-style trays to the downtown lunch crowd.

At its peak, the family ran six locations around St. Louis, including spots in the Central West End and Rock Hill.

The last one standing, on Chippewa Street along the old Route 66 alignment, closed in June 2013, just short of the chain’s hundredth year.

Joe Garavelli made a point of greeting regulars personally at the door.

Rising costs and a shrinking lunch crowd, by multiple accounts, made the math stop working.

Garavelli’s had earned a spot in the National Historic Route 66 Federation’s dining guide.

There hasn’t been a Garavelli’s since Chippewa Street closed for the last time.

3. Putsch’s Cafeteria

Putsch’s Cafeteria grew out of the Bluebird Cafeteria, a family-run lunchroom at Troost and Linwood that Justus “Jud” Putsch took over after he returned to Kansas City in 1940.

Putsch had a Harvard business degree and years at a New Jersey Macy’s behind him before he came home to run the place.

Putsch’s 210 opened on the Plaza in 1947, and the family later added the Plaza’s first sidewalk cafe.

Those additions made Putsch’s the place to be seen for lunch through the 1950s and 1960s.

Local writers still revisit Putsch’s story decades later.

A 2022 book on Kansas City’s lost restaurants featured Putsch’s 210 among its highlights.

Kansas City’s public radio station has counted Putsch’s among the closed restaurants locals still bring up.

The family kept expanding, and the group grew to about a dozen restaurants and cafeterias by 1971.

That same year, the Putsches sold the whole operation to the Montgomery Ward Company.

The Montgomery Ward ownership didn’t last long.

One by one, the Putsch’s locations closed or changed names, and the last one closed in the early 1990s, with nothing bearing the name since.

4. Smaks

The Smaks restaurants grew out of Allen’s Drive-In, a burger stand Wayne Jones purchased at 63rd and Paseo in Kansas City in 1944.

Jones was a former Kroger meat department manager with no restaurant background at all.

The Smaks name launched in 1956, and the burger chain spread across both sides of the state line.

At its busiest, more than two dozen Smaks locations dotted Kansas and Missouri, including spots at Ward Parkway Center and on Troost Avenue in Kansas City.

National competitors moved in, and debt piled up from years of fast growth.

Smaks filed for bankruptcy in 1983.

Three years was all it took for every Smaks in the region to close for good.

People still wonder what happened to Smaks.

Flatland, a Kansas City news outlet, took up the question after a reader asked, and the Johnson County Museum has been assembling an exhibit of Smaks photos and artifacts.

A Smaks burger isn’t something anyone can order anywhere today.

5. KC Masterpiece

KC Masterpiece started as a barbecue sauce Dr. Rich Davis, a Kansas City child psychiatrist, began bottling and selling to grocers in 1977.

The sauce did well enough that Davis opened a sit-down KC Masterpiece Barbecue & Grill in Overland Park in 1987, then more.

At its high point, six restaurants carried the KC Masterpiece name across Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago.

Davis sold the sauce recipe to Clorox for between $8 million and $10 million, keeping the restaurants as a separate business.

The chain even planned to expand into Denver and Phoenix at one point.

Neither city ever got a KC Masterpiece, and the map only shrank from there.

Location after location closed in the years after, including the original Overland Park restaurant and the one on Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza.

None of them ever reopened.

When Davis died in 2015, KCUR, Kansas City’s public radio station, remembered him as the home cook behind a sauce that made the KC Masterpiece name known worldwide.

Walk into just about any grocery store, and a bottle of KC Masterpiece sauce is still sitting on the shelf, made by a company Davis sold decades ago.

The sauce recipe lived on because it left the restaurant business behind, not because any restaurant did.

What Stands There Today

These lost restaurant chains left behind more than a menu people still talk about.

Forum Cafeterias' old flagship spot on Main Street is now the ground floor of the One Kansas City Place office tower.

A streetcar stop sits where the tray line used to run.

Garavelli's building on Chippewa Street came down not long after the family locked up, and a credit union bought the land underneath it.

Not even the building survived.

A couple of old Smaks corners still sell burgers today, just under Wendy's and Arby's signs instead.