Menya Rui's Steven Pursley Makes Food & Wine's Best New Chefs List

The magazine singled out the St. Louis restaurant's "tender, bouncy, delectably slurpable noodles"

Sep 12, 2023 at 12:55 pm

Chef-owner Steven Pursley in the kitchen.

Mabel Suen

Food & Wine singled out chef-owner Steven Pursley's amazing noodles.

Today, national culinary magazine Food & Wine announced its 2023 11 Best New Chefs in America — and St. Louisans will find one of the names very familiar.

Steven Pursley, who opened his Japanese ramen shop Menya Rui (3453 Hampton Avenue, 314-601-3524) in April 2022, made the exclusive list. Food & Wine cited his "tender, bouncy, delectably slurpable noodles," which led reviewer Khushbu Shah to eat four bowls of ramen in one sitting, as the star of the show.

Pursley, whose Lindenwood Park restaurant can be spotted easily by the line out its door, was born in Okinawa, Japan, and spent part of his childhood there before coming to the St. Louis area. Partway through college, he realized he didn't know what he wanted to do after school, as he told the RFT's Cheryl Baehr in October. He enrolled in a community college engineering program but then decided to do the very opposite thing: move to Japan to study ramen.

He went on to spend three years in Japan doing just that. He got jobs in ramen shops and worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Then, in 2017, he returned to St. Louis and worked at various restaurants around town, notably Indo, while starting a private pop-up for friends.

When he finally opened the doors at Menya Rui last year, the buzz was unreal, and the hype only grew as St. Louisans tried his outstanding noodles and came back for seconds. Baehr is among the shop's fans, calling it an "entirely new world of Japanese noodles." Shah agrees, saying that Pursley's tsukemen was one of the best she'd had, and in general, "each bowl was thoughtful and balanced."

With those kinds of endorsements, Menya Rui's line is unlikely to get shorter anytime soon. But the good news is that the bowl you get will be worth the wait.

“I’m really grateful to have this opportunity to really try to push ramen forward. I want ramen to be an everyday choice in America,” Pursley told Food & Wine. “Most importantly, I want it to be good ramen.”

This story has been updated.

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