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History

Remembering Duff's, the CWE restaurant that a BankAmericard made possible

Welcome to Lost Tables, our look at St. Louis' rich history of restaurant greatness.

Ever wondered what happened to that restaurant you once loved and have memories of dining at with your family and friends? We did! And we discovered an amazing website called Lost Tables, dedicated to celebrating the restaurants of our past. We are partnering with the site's creator Harley Hammerman and celebrating these wonderful stories throughout the month of February.

Lost Tables | Duff's

Karen Duffy graduated Nerinx Hall high school in 1963 as Mary Karen Theresa Moran. After obtaining a degree in classics at Rosary College near Chicago, she married, had two children and then took a detour back to St. Louis.

My first husband, Dan Duffy, and I sold everything we owned one year – our house, our car, most of our stuff. We flew Icelandic Airlines to Reykjavik, because that was the cheapest way to get to Europe in the '70s. We said, "Let's get off the plane and see what's going on here." We didn't have an agenda, and we certainly didn't have much money. We had a couple weeks in Reykjavik (before touring the rest of Europe).

We bought a Peugeot touring bus and turned it into a little van to live in. We lived in it for almost a year. The kids, Patrick and Katie, were 5 and 3. That's why we could do it, because they weren't in school yet. After that, we thought, what are we going to do when we go home?

I realized how much I loved having my husband cooking sometimes and sharing child care. So I said, "We need to do something together, where you work sometimes and I work sometimes, instead of me just being the housewife." We didn't go out to eat a lot when we traveled, but when we did, it was to those little neighborhood restaurants where you'd have some food with your family and meet the neighbors. That appealed to us, and coming home on the plane, we met someone from St. Louis who told us about an empty storefront in the Central West End. We checked it out. It was pretty cheap back then – $125 a month for the space and $125 for an apartment upstairs. We paid $250, and opened the restaurant.

Karen and Dan Duffy opened Duff's at 392 North Euclid, near McPherson, on July 7, 1972.

Click here to read the rest of the history of Duff's on Lost Tables

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