Good Strangers

Good Strangers takes its name from philoxenia, the Greek word for love of the stranger, and the whole place is built around that idea. Sarah Fisher opened it in 2024 after more than a decade in Texas, having come back to St. Louis wanting to make the kind of room where people who do not know each other end up talking.

It works as a coffee shop and a grab-and-go deli at once. The espresso bar runs beyond the standard list – the tahini latte, built on espresso, sesame butter syrup and milk, is the drink people come back for and the one that tells you what sort of kitchen this is. Breakfast runs to bagel sandwiches and the counter carries prepared food through lunch, so it serves equally well for a coffee and a laptop or for lunch taken away.

The bar itself has a history older than the business. The pale pink and green tile came out of a 1930s Davis Drugstore soda fountain in Paxton, Illinois, was taken apart and reassembled here, and finished with a terrazzo-style top. It is a fitting object for a street that has made a trade of rescuing good old things, and it gives the room a warmth that no new fit-out achieves.

Good Strangers also sets out to be usable as a meeting space rather than merely tolerating people who linger – it is a room designed for staying in, which is rarer than it sounds.

It sits on the eastern end of Cherokee Street, past the antique dealers and among the restaurants and bars, and is one of the more recent arrivals on a stretch that has been filling up steadily.