Chase Club Redesign: Honoring a St. Louis Legend

The Chase Club is the signature restaurant of Chase Park Plaza Royal Sonesta, a landmark hotel on Kingshighway Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri. Since its founding in 1922, the Chase Park Plaza has been the social crown jewel of the city, the address where presidents slept, performers played, and St. Louis made its memories.

Chase Club sits at the heart of that legacy, operating as a destination in its own right. The venue offers live entertainment, a defined culinary identity, a loyal local following, and a guest book that reads like a who’s who of the 20th century.

View the Redesigned Website

The Chase Club Website Homepage

The pre-redesign Chase Club website was a set of simple pages covering the hotel with important details.

Without a story or personality showing through the digital experience, a first-time visitor landing on it had no way of knowing they were looking at a venue with a century of pop culture history and a live music program that draws regulars every week.

The redesign opened five clear opportunities.

1. A History and Brand Storytelling Layer

The venue’s remarkable past, the celebrity guests, the cultural milestones, the decades of St. Louis social life, existed nowhere on the site. A century of story was waiting to be told.

2. A Live Events Infrastructure

Chase Club hosts regular live performances, but the website offered only a bare list of upcoming dates. The opportunity was to expand on this and put it front and center.

3. A Menu Experience to Match the Room

The menu appeared as a static list, without visual hierarchy or a sense that the food and cocktail program deserved attention. The opportunity to make it an appetite-driver was wide open.

4. A Mobile-First Audience

A venue that attracts locals and travelers alike needs a site that performs on a phone. The existing pages fell short on that front, a straightforward fix with an outsized impact on reach.

5. A Lighter Maintenance Load

Updating any content required direct HTML edits. For a busy venue team, this meant the site stayed perpetually out of date. Automating that friction away would let the team focus on running the room instead of the website.

The Chase Club redesign was a layered build with three distinct chapters, each solving a different dimension of the problem.

Chapter 1: The About Page, A Century Told Well

The most important decision we made in this redesign was to treat the Chase Club story as content infrastructure, central to the experience rather than a decorative afterthought.

The history of this venue, the celebrities, the cultural moments, the decades of St. Louis social life, functions as the primary reason someone would choose The Chase Club over any other restaurant in the city.

We built the About page as an immersive editorial experience with three core components.

The Historical Timeline

From its 1922 founding as the social crown jewel of St. Louis, including its role as an in-the-know source of quality beverages during Prohibition, rumored to be stored in secret tunnels running under Lindell, through the glamour decades of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the timeline gives visitors a structured journey through a century of Chase Park Plaza history. Each era is its own beat, designed to be browsed or read in full.

About Page Timeline – The Chase Club Website

The Legends Gallery

The guest list reads like a syllabus for American culture in the 20th century. We built a dedicated section to give these names the weight they deserve, organized across three categories:

• The Guests
• The Moments
• The Performers

About Page Stories – The Chase Club Website

Among The Guests: Coretta Scott King. Muhammad Ali. Jackie Robinson. Lucille Ball. Johnny Carson. Liza Minnelli. The Rolling Stones. First Ladies from Eleanor Roosevelt to Nancy Reagan. Eleven United States Presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to George H.W. Bush.

Among the stories:

• Dean Martin performed here.
• Elvis Presley stayed at The Chase and requested the freight elevator be reserved exclusively for his use to maintain his privacy, remaining sequestered until stage time.
• Ella Fitzgerald received a bracelet from Count Basie in the hotel shop.

Some of these are confirmed history. Some are cherished legends. All of them are true to the spirit of a place where extraordinary things have always happened. We gave each figure a profile, complete with name, description, and era, designed to be discovered and shared.

The Conversion Moment

The About page closes with a simple, direct invitation, “You’ve heard the story. Now come write yours,” followed by a reservation CTA. The sequencing matters.

We build desire through storytelling, then convert. The visitor who has just read about Dean Martin and Elvis is already convinced, so all that’s left is the invitation.

Chapter 2: The Live Events Calendar, Always Current, Zero Maintenance

Chase Club’s live music program is one of its strongest draws, and it could easily go unnoticed online. We built a live events calendar directly into the website with one non-negotiable design requirement. It had to stay current without the venue team manually maintaining it.

Live Events Page – The Chase Club Website

When a performance date passes, the event disappears from the page automatically. The result is a calendar that always reflects what’s coming up next, with nothing stale or outdated left for the team to manage, giving visitors a reason to check back often.

For a busy venue team, this saves real time every week. The old site required direct HTML edits for any content update, creating a maintenance burden that kept the site perpetually behind. The new calendar removes that friction. The team adds events, and the site handles the rest.

Chapter 3: The Menu Page, Seasonal, Scrollable, and Built to Perform

The menu page needs to make people hungry enough to book a table. The previous Chase Club menu page, a static, unstyled list, fell short of that job.

The redesigned menu page rests on two principles:

1. Visual appetite
2. Frictionless navigation

Seasonal Cocktail Spotlight

The hero of the menu page is the seasonal cocktail feature, a prominent section that rotates with the season and signals to visitors that the beverage program is alive and curated.

It also gives the venue team a built-in mechanism to keep the page feeling fresh without a full content overhaul.

Tabbed Scrollable Menu

Below the seasonal feature, the full menu is organized into a tabbed, scrollable format covering food, cocktails, wine, and any other categories the venue chooses to surface. Users tap a tab and jump directly to the section they want, spending time only on the content that interests them.

Menus Page – The Chase Club Website

The architecture was built to perform equally well on desktop and mobile. On a phone, the tabs sit at the top of the screen and remain accessible as the user scrolls, so the navigation stays visible throughout the browse. On desktop, the layout expands to use the available space fully, staying balanced rather than sparse or over-padded.

The Chase Club carries a different kind of weight than a typical restaurant client. It is a venue with a century of accumulated cultural capital, a place that has earned its reputation through decades of extraordinary moments.

Every design decision in this redesign serves a purpose. The immersive About page, the self-maintaining events calendar, and the visually led menu all exist because Chase Club’s guests deserve a digital experience that is at least as interesting as the venue they’re considering visiting.

That is the standard we held ourselves to, and the standard every hotel F&B venue with real character should hold its website to.

Magic happens when the client brings the stories and the agency brings the architecture to tell them. Chase Club arrived with more raw material than most venues we’ve worked with, including a century of history, guest list spanning presidents and performers, and a live music program that keeps the room alive every week.

Our job was to build a digital home worthy of all of it, one a first-time visitor could land on and immediately understand as more than a restaurant. This is a place where something is always happening, where history was made, and where the next great night out is waiting.

That’s the brief we set out to answer, and it’s exactly what we built.

Whether your F&B venue is a century-old landmark or a concept in its first year, your website should do justice to what happens inside it.

Ready to build a digital experience that earns its own audience?

Speak with Digital Spice strategists about your next redesign.

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