Press

The former UKRAFT Café and Catering tweaked its concept and moved to a larger space downtown.

UKraft, a sandwich, wrap, salad and soup spot, is opening a second location with an expanded menu at 701 Market St. this December. The concept started out as a food truck in 2018 and opened a cafe in the Regions Center building in downtown Clayton in July 2019. Co-owners and brothers Matt and Mike Ratz have signed a five-year lease on the first floor of the Peabody Plaza downtown...

Dining Editor George Mahe was a guest on Show Me St. Louis to discuss some of the places mentioned on the list.

It was certainly crafty of Matt Ratz to launch UKRAFT, a health-based sandwich/wrap/salad concept in a low-risk food truck, but it wasn’t until the food truck–based 9 Mile Garden took off that UKRAFT’s business did as well. Pandemic be damned, Ratz and brother Mike Ratz opened their first brick-and-mortar location downtown, in Peabody Plaza, in mid-January...

UKRAFT allows customers to “kraft” their meals.

After opening their health-focused restaurant near Citygarden less than a year ago, brothers Matt and Mike Ratz will expand the concept to a larger space and add dinner hours, new items, and a private event space...

Matt Ratz will never forget the feeling he got from watching the moving trucks roll into the lot of the Clayton Regions Centre office building in early March of 2020. Like everyone else, he’d been growing increasingly concerned about a new coronavirus that was emerging as a global health threat, but he wasn’t all that sure what to make of it. However, if he and his brother, Mike, had learned anything since opening UKraft inside the building a year and a half prior, it was that the wonks who worked at its financial firms had an inside scoop into what was happening in the world. That they were not simply locking up but packing their things for the long haul was an ominous sign...