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Sweetie Pie’s closing last St. Louis area location

Owner Robbie Montgomery and her family rose to national fame on the Oprah-owned network OWN with the reality series 'Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s.'

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Sweetie Pie’s Upper Crust (3643 Delmar) will be closing after this Sunday, September 25, according to a post on Facebook.

According to the post, the closure will make room for the multi-million-dollar Cochran Veteran’s Hospital expansion. The sister location that opened in owner Robbie Montgomery’s home state of Mississippi, in January 2020, remains open. 

The news comes a week after Montgomery’s son James “Tim” Norman was convicted of conspiring to kill Andre Montgomery, his 21-year-old nephew and Robbie Montgomery’s grandson, in 2016.

A former backup dancer for Ike and Tina Turner, Montgomery and her family rose to national fame on the Oprah-owned network OWN with the reality series Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s. The show ran for nine seasons, between 2011 and 2018. 

Recently, Montgomery has been looking to expand in other ways. Grotonics’ website lists her as CEO and majority owner, noting that she is “bringing her recipes and commercial kitchen success to the green market, where she is excited to offer her new Grotonics Medical Marijuana Edible product line.” An application for a cannabis license was rejected by the state of Missouri, however, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, so the line will be on hold until the license is granted.

The closure of Upper Crust comes just a few days shy of Montgomery’s 82nd birthday. With a 30-year tenure in the restaurant industry, she saw multiple Sweetie Pie’s area locations close over the years, leaving the Delmar spot as the remaining holdout post-pandemic. In a 2021 interview with Black Enterprise, Montgomery talked about the struggles of keeping a restaurant afloat during the pandemic, as well as her recently released single and video “Ain’t My Stuff Good Enough.” 

Montgomery, who has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, shared the news about the Upper Crust’s closing, thanking everyone for their “25 years of support” and "We hope to have an opportunity to serve you in the future."

SLM has reached out to Montgomery for additional comment.