"Our mission is to be the heart of our community," says Audrea Strelo, who opened Lakeside Bookshop with her business partner Maria Higby in the fall of 2025. It's the kind of line a lot of new shops say. What makes it worth repeating here is that Strelo and Higby built the actual mechanics of a community into the shop before they ever unlocked the front door: three recurring clubs, each with its own night, each already running before the store had been open a full year.
Two miles away, in a different plaza, a meadery did something similar without coordinating with anyone. Burnt Barrel Brewery, Distillery and Meadery runs DJ Trivia every Thursday night. It's not a special event. It's the schedule.
Lake St. Louis has plenty of places to eat well once. What's new this year is a pair of businesses that don't just want you back, they've built a specific night of the week that only works if you show up on it.
The Meadows already had a rush hour
The Meadows at Lake Saint Louis, the outdoor shopping and dining center on Meadows Circle Drive, has spent the past couple of years building a reputation as something like the town's downtown. It's owned and managed by Cohen Equities, hosts a weekly free SummerFest concert series and the Saturday-morning farmers market, and by this spring counted more than 30 shops and restaurants under one walkable footprint. That's the version of Lake St. Louis most people already picture: a Thursday concert, a Saturday market, a dinner reservation.
Lakeside Bookshop opened into that same footprint, at 10 Meadows Circle Drive, Suite 108, next door to Olive Tree Marketplace. On paper it looks like one more tenant filling out the roster. In practice it's doing something the restaurants and retailers around it aren't: it's asking people to organize their calendar around it, not just their evening.
A bookshop that asks you to come back three different ways
Lakeside Bookshop keeps regular hours, Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., but the hours aren't really the point. The shop runs three separate recurring clubs, each on its own fixed night:
- The Lakeside Book Club meets the third Wednesday of every month.
- The Lakeside Cookbook Club gathers the second Wednesday to cook and taste a chosen recipe together.
- The St. Charles Silent Book Club is a no-pressure drop-in reading night on the last Thursday of the month, no discussion required, just a room full of people reading their own books next to each other.
Layered on top of that standing calendar are one-off events that still function on the same logic: author readings, paint-and-sip nights, craft evenings, and in the shop's first spring a Mother's Day pop-up floral event with The Petal Bar. Strelo has said events tend to fill up fast enough that registering ahead, even for the free ones, is worth doing.
None of that happens by accident. Higby's background is in experiential entertainment, building spaces designed to make people linger and return. Strelo spent her career as a speech pathologist, work built around the idea that stories are how people connect. The shop's format, three clubs instead of one big monthly event, reads like a direct translation of that combined resume: give a cook a Wednesday, give a reader a different Wednesday, give the person who just wants quiet company a Thursday.
The first meadery in town keeps its own key
Burnt Barrel sits at 730 Lakeside Plaza, in a different part of town from The Meadows, and it got there first in a category nobody else in Lake Saint Louis had tried. Owner Nathan Price started out home-brewing beer, fell into mead almost by accident, found a mentor, and built what's now described as the area's first dedicated meadery.
The tasting room keeps a tighter schedule than the bookshop: open Thursday 4 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 2 to 10 p.m., and Sunday noon to 6 p.m. Beer runs $6 a glass, priced below most other local breweries. The mead list rotates through more than a dozen flavors at a time, with names like Sunshine and Vanilla Coconut Lime alongside a traditional dry style, and the distillery side pours small-batch bourbon, Six-fold vodka, Echo whiskey and a newer Six Sided Gin. The room itself leans unpretentious: board games on the tables, Bob Ross reruns on the TVs, a food menu built around shareable comfort plates like fried mushrooms and a pretzel with mustard.
The recurring hooks are built the same way the bookshop's are, just aimed at a different crowd. DJ Trivia runs every Thursday night. There's a growler club with its own member perks, and a monthly food and drink pairing series that gives regulars a reason to plan around a specific date rather than just dropping in when they feel like a drink. Price has described the goal plainly: a place where customers become friends, built around handcrafted small-batch drinks rather than volume.
Why a calendar beats a menu
A restaurant earns a repeat visit by being good enough that you think of it again. A club earns a repeat visit by already having a date on your calendar. Those are different kinds of loyalty, and they behave differently over time. A great meal can lose you to a better meal down the street. A standing Wednesday is harder to poach, because the competition isn't just another bookshop, it's whatever else was going to happen to you on the third Wednesday of the month.
That's the quieter story behind both of these businesses. Neither one is trying to out-menu the restaurants already doing well in Lake St. Louis. The bookshop isn't competing with Olive Tree Marketplace next door for dinner traffic. The meadery isn't trying to be the best bar in St. Charles County. Both built a reason to return that has almost nothing to do with what's for sale on a given day and everything to do with what day it is.
It also means these two businesses, despite sitting in different plazas and serving different appetites, are running the identical experiment: turn a single visit into a standing appointment, and let the appointment do the marketing.
One week, mapped
If you wanted to catch everything both places run on a recurring basis, a single month gives you the full rotation. Every Thursday, Burnt Barrel runs trivia starting in the evening. On the second Wednesday, the bookshop's Cookbook Club meets to cook something together. On the third Wednesday, the Book Club takes the same room for a different kind of night. On the last Thursday of the month, two things happen on opposite sides of town at the same time: the Silent Book Club quietly reads at Lakeside, and trivia runs as usual at Burnt Barrel, meaning the last Thursday is the one night a month where the choice is genuinely between two different kinds of quiet company and two different kinds of noise.
None of this requires planning ahead in the way a big annual festival does. It just requires remembering which Wednesday is which, and which Thursday has two options instead of one.
What it says about the town
A community earns a reputation for its lake, its parks, its farmers market, the things that show up on every list. What's harder to spot from the outside is a town that's started producing places built around a specific returning night rather than a single great visit. That's a different kind of small business ecosystem than a strong restaurant row, and it tends to be stickier, because the businesses aren't just hoping you come back. They've already put you on the calendar.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's actually changing in Lake St. Louis, not just what's for sale, the Lisa Adkins Team keeps an eye on this kind of thing too. Feel free to reach out if you ever want to talk about what else is taking shape around town.
