Wright's Tavern Outgrew Itself. The Fix Is Opening Across the Street This Fall.

On a busy Friday night, the sidewalk outside Wright's Tavern on Wydown Boulevard has a small, predictable problem: people standing on it with nowhere to go. The steakhouse seats about 40 people inside 1,100 square feet, and it was built that way on purpose. Owner Matt McGuire wanted an intimate room when he opened it in December 2022, the kind of place he compared to a European tavern that felt like it had been there for decades. It worked. The tables fill, and the wait spills onto the pavement, because there has never been a place to put the overflow.

That is changing this fall, and the way it is changing tells you more about how this stretch of Clayton actually functions than any list of new restaurant names would.

The Storefront Across the Street Was Never a Coincidence

Directly across Wydown from Wright's Tavern sits 7645 Wydown Blvd, a corner that has been dark since 2021, when the Starbucks there closed. A local franchise group tried to revive it and the deal fell through, so the space sat empty for years on one of the most visible corners in Clayton's business district. In April 2026, Clayton's Plan Commission and Architectural Review Board approved a conditional-use permit for McGuire to convert that same corner into Gigi, a café named for his mother.

The location is not incidental. McGuire has said the new spot is meant to be, in his own words, something a little more penetrable, a no-reservations space where guests can drop in throughout the day, including those waiting for a table at Wright's Tavern, which lacks a dedicated waiting area. That single sentence is the entire story. Gigi is not a new restaurant competing for Wydown's attention. It is a waiting room that also happens to serve pizza.

Three Doors, One Operator, One Problem He Made Himself

McGuire's résumé on this stretch of Clayton now runs three storefronts deep: Louie, the restaurant that started it all, Wright's Tavern two blocks over, and now Gigi. He has also opened Box Hill Grocer nearby, which he has described as another way to relieve some of the same pressure, letting some of the gas out of that balloon, in his words, for customers who need somewhere to go before a table opens up.

Gigi is set to run at roughly 2,500 square feet, more than double the footprint of Wright's Tavern next door. That gap between the two buildings is the actual data point worth paying attention to. A 1,100-square-foot dining room built for intimacy created a bottleneck. The fix isn't a bigger dining room at the original address. It's a second, much larger building built specifically to absorb what the first one can't hold.

The café will serve Coma Coffee and pastries through the morning, then close and reopen in the evening for drinks and St. Louis-style bar pizza, with Michael Petres, a Louie chef with a pizza background, developing the menu alongside Louie executive chef Sean Turner. The plan is a single kitchen team feeding a coffee counter by day and a pizza bar by night, inside a building whose main job is standing in for the dining room across the street until a table frees up.

What the City Meeting Actually Revealed

The permit hearing itself is worth knowing about, because it shows how small and personally run this whole operation still is. During the meeting, a resident named Karen Fairbank raised concerns about parking and delivery trucks clogging the street and alley behind the building, a real and specific worry for anyone who lives nearby. She followed it with the kind of honesty that only comes from someone who actually walks that block: she wasn't objecting, she said, she was excited to have the café there and just wanted the logistics handled.

Commission members also pushed McGuire on hours, asking him to consider staying open on Sundays for the benefit of the neighborhood. He admitted he personally never works Sundays and said he couldn't ask staff to do something he wouldn't do himself, but allowed that it was worth considering for the neighborhood's sake. None of that made it into a press release. It came out of a public meeting where a small business owner and his future neighbors worked out the details of a corner that has sat empty for five years.

What This Means for a Wydown Regular This Fall

If you already live near this stretch, the practical change is simple. Right now, a Friday reservation at Wright's Tavern means a wait on the sidewalk if you're early or the table isn't quite ready. Once Gigi opens, that wait has an actual destination: coffee in the morning, a seat and a drink in the evening, on the same block, run by the same kitchen. McGuire has targeted an October opening, which puts it right in the same window as the rest of Clayton's fall calendar, though he's been clear that plans can shift as the buildout finishes.

The bigger shift is less about any single meal and more about what it says regarding demand on that block. A restaurateur doesn't lease a 2,500-square-foot building across the street from his own 1,100-square-foot dining room unless the smaller one has been consistently full enough to justify it. That is not a hunch. It's the kind of decision that only gets made after years of watching the same problem repeat itself on the same sidewalk.

For anyone who has eaten at Wright's Tavern more than once, the corner across the street has probably registered as just another empty storefront, the kind every neighborhood has one or two of. By October, it becomes the answer to a question longtime regulars have been asking without ever quite phrasing it: where do we go while we wait.

If you're the kind of Clayton resident who tracks what opens on your own street before it makes the news, you already know the neighborhood rewards that kind of attention, whether it's a corner café or a house that's about to come up for sale nearby. If you're weighing a move within Clayton or curious what your own place is worth in a market that keeps proving how much local detail matters, the Julie Moran Team is happy to talk it through. Get Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready.