It’s Official. The Fountain on Locust has the Best Soup in Missouri!
Our award-winning Chicken Tortilla Soup.
We have a confession to make.
When we bought The Fountain on Locust from Ron and Joy, soup was not exactly top of mind. If we're being completely transparent, we were here for the cocktails. We were here for the ice cream martinis and the Art Deco murals and the incredible atmosphere that made this place unlike anything else in St. Louis. We had been coming here for years as guests — it was one of our favorite date night spots — and we fell in love with the glamour of it all.
Soup, we'll admit, did not feature prominently in our daydreams about ownership.
Then came Day One.
The Phone Rang. And Rang. And Rang.
On our very first day running The Fountain, before we had even gotten our footing, the phone started ringing. Again and again, the same question: What's the Soup of the Day? We looked at each other. We looked at the phone. We thought: what is the deal with this soup?
As it turns out, the deal is everything.
Our flavorful, spicy and healthy Italian Sausage Soup
Week after week, we watched our kitchen team produce something remarkable. Each new batch of scratch-made soup was different — seasonal, creative, soulful — and each one was better than we expected. Chili Con Chatta. Tuscan White Bean. Spicy Sausage & Kale. Pozole. Cajun Corn Chowder. And then, the one that changed everything for us personally: Polish Dill Pickle.
We had stepped into a culinary tradition that ran deeper than we initially understood. The scratch soup program at The Fountain is not a menu item — it is a living legacy, tended by a team that takes enormous pride in what comes out of that kitchen every single day. We are grateful every day that we were entrusted to protect it.
Missouri's Best Soup, Made Fresh in Midtown St. Louis
This week, Only in Your State — a beloved national publication dedicated to celebrating what makes each state uniquely worth exploring — named us home of the best soup in Missouri. We want to be clear about what that means: not the best soup in St. Louis (though we'll take that title too), not the best in the Midwest, but the best in the entire state of Missouri.
We are enormously proud. And we want to make sure that pride lands exactly where it belongs: with our kitchen team. They are the ones who show up every week and turn simple, honest ingredients into something people drive across the city for — and apparently, something that stands out across the whole state. They are the real story here.
The recognition from Only in Your State joins a list of accolades our soup program has earned over the years, including Best Soup in St. Louis. Paired with our Feast Magazine award for Best Service in St. Louis (2023) and our Top 4 ranking among all St. Louis restaurants on TripAdvisor, it paints a picture of a kitchen — and a team — firing on all cylinders, all the time.
The one that started it all: our famous Polish Dill Pickle So
The One That Started It All: The Famous Polish Dill Pickle Soup
St. Louis's Most Beloved Bowl
If we had to name the single soup most responsible for making believers out of us — and, we suspect, most responsible for catching the attention of Only in Your State — it would be the Polish Dill Pickle Soup. Tangy, deeply savory, warming in all the right ways, it is the soup that made those early phone calls make sense to us. It is the soup that turned skeptical new owners into true believers.
People order it for the first time with a slightly raised eyebrow. They finish the bowl and start telling their friends. That is the quiet power of something made with real craft and real care — it does not need to be explained. It just needs to be tasted.
If the Pickle Soup is new to you, we are genuinely excited for you. That first bowl is something.
Come Celebrate With Us — A Spoon Is Waiting
We are located at 3037 Locust Street in the heart of St. Louis's Grand Center Arts District, right in the middle of everything. We are steps from the Fox Theatre, close to Powell Symphony Hall and the St. Louis Symphony, and just around the corner from The Sovereign. Whether you are planning an evening out in Midtown or simply in need of the best bowl of soup in Missouri on a Tuesday afternoon, we are here.
Right now, we have a fresh batch of Cheesy Potato Bacon and Mexican Bean Stew ready to go — alongside whatever other magic our kitchen has conjured this week. Call us and ask about the Soup of the Day. We love that question now.
Whether this is your first time hearing about us or you are a regular who has been ordering the Pickle Soup since before we took over, we want you to come in and celebrate this with us. This award belongs to our whole community — the kitchen team who earns it every day, and every single guest who has ever called to ask what's in the pot.
The best soup in Missouri is scratch-made, served hot, and ready for you in Midtown St. Louis. We are so glad you found us.
Some of our favorite soup-er accolades include:
Yelp naming us on their Must-Slurp List and named our Polish Dill Pickle Soup the #1 Soup in Missouri.
St. Louis Post Dispatch have repeatedly featured recipes for Fountain soups saying “Our readers simply can’t get enough of the deliciously inventive panoply of soups The Fountain offers.'“
St. Louis Magazine featured The Fountain on Locust as having the Best Soups in St. Louis.
