Saint Louis / Missouri / United States
Lona’s Lil Eats, a St Louis restaurant and catering service, is home to the Giant Rice Paper Wrap. We specialize in fresh Asian cuisine with a soul-food flare. We focus on more than just flavor; we focus on feeling and physical sensations. We use fresh ingredients just chopped, absolutely NO MSG, make all our seasonings and sauces from scratch-from peeling the garlic, roasting peanuts, on up. Our food is filling, but won’t leave one feeling heavy, with flavors so grounded in excitement that the last bite is the most delicious, for real! Lona’s Lil Eats began in 2008 as an experimental project using just one gas grill in Soulard Farmers Market. The name, Lona’s Lil (little) Eats, is a literal translation from Chinese for roughly “a hole-in-the-wall selling stop-and-go food place.” The original intention was to bring a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant into the market. Well, not really Thai in any familiar sense, but this is the United States-you gotta have an eye-catcher! While the stand at Soulard Farmers Market remains open every Saturday for lunch, we now have a brick-and-mortar shop that owners Pierce and Lona live above with their two children Jane and Daniel. The menu is comprised of options that were formed organically through participation with Soulard Farmers Market patrons. So, while Lona’s Lil Eats serves food in several novel forms, these forms were not creations obsessively planned, but rather obsessively intuited from the social experience between Lona, Pierce, and creative (Demanding? Is there a difference?) fans.
