Evergreen Butcher and Baker

Sourdough, pastry, and a butcher case in the same room

Bread and meat are treated as household staples here rather than luxuries, and the shop is built to sell both from one counter. Sourdough leads the bakery side, with specialty pastries beside it, while the butcher case runs on meat sourced as locally as possible and raised sustainably and responsibly. Neither half is an afterthought to the other. Emma and Sean Schacke built the business around exactly that pairing, and the split of labour is plain: she bakes, he butchers.

A Kirkwood shop the owners live above

In 2018 the Schackes bought a vintage building next to the Kirkwood police station and moved in upstairs. Evergreen Butcher + Baker opened on the ground floor in September 2019. The scale has stayed small and neighbourhood-facing since, closer to a market than a restaurant, and the sourcing language is the clearest statement of intent the shop makes: ingredients thoughtfully chosen, raised responsibly, bought as close to home as the season allows.

Cheeseburger Sunday began in February 2020, when Emma Schacke made fifty of them. The batch rose to seventy-five, then a hundred. By that September the burgers were often gone by the end of service, with a queue forming around half past twelve for a one o’clock release. The burger sits exactly between the two halves of the shop, which is why it works: prepared food from a place founded on bread, pastry and meat, with no restaurant premise attached.

Order the sourdough, then decide about Sunday

Start with the sourdough, one of the named pillars, and add a specialty pastry to read the bakery counter beyond bread. For the savoury side the butcher half matters as much, and the meat is the reason a good part of the neighbourhood comes in at all. If you are buying for the week, a loaf and something from the case is the standard errand here.

On Sunday, the cheeseburger is the thing, and it is worth arriving before the release rather than after it. The shop’s reputation has travelled further than the block it sits on, including a place on the New York Times list of twenty-two of the best bakeries in the United States in 2024, but what it actually sells has not changed: sourdough, pastries, meat, and the Sunday burger.