Take Exit 186 off I-55 and the green sign reads "Imperial / Kimmswick," stacked on top of each other like they're the same place. They are not. One is a fossil bed named after a town it happens to sit inside of. The other has a bakery that ships pie nationwide because of a flood that happened over thirty years ago. If you live in Imperial, you already know which one gets your Saturday night.
This isn't a knock on Imperial. It's a pattern worth naming, because once you see it, it explains a lot about how a week here actually unfolds.
The Exit That Splits the Town in Two
Imperial's population sits at roughly 5,800 people as of this year, and the commercial stretch along the highway corridor looks like most fast-growing exurbs: Subway, Papa John's, Hardee's, a Krispy Krunchy Chicken counter inside the Express Mart. Functional. Fast. Not where anyone lingers.
Kimmswick, one exit closer to the river, has a little over a hundred residents. It also has a two-block historic district of 19th-century storefronts that draws day-trippers from across the region, and it's where the sit-down dinner, the wine tasting, and the Saturday festival actually happen. The split isn't about which town is nicer. It's about which one kept a walkable core and which one became a highway corridor lined with chains. Imperial grew as rooftops and drive-thrus. Kimmswick, founded in 1859 by German dry goods merchant Theodore Kimm, kept its original footprint and leaned into it. That decision, made generations ago, is still doing the work of deciding where you eat dinner tonight.
What's Actually Open When You Want a Real Meal
Imperial isn't entirely without an exception. Frankie Gianino's Grill & Bar, on Main Street in Imperial itself, has been family-owned for 16 years, known for scratch-made portions and a patio built around an outdoor fireplace. It's the kind of place that proves Imperial can support a real sit-down restaurant. It's also mostly alone in doing it.
Kimmswick, by contrast, has a cluster. The Blue Owl Restaurant & Bakery has been a fixture on 2nd Street since 1984, when Mary Hostetter turned a home baking business into a full restaurant. Her daughter Kim Byerly and Kim's husband Dan now run it, carrying forward a recipe that has less to do with flour and more to do with disaster response.
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the menu description. In 1993, the Mississippi River rose high enough to threaten Kimmswick with evacuation, and volunteers built a makeshift levee out of sandbags to hold it back. The town survived. Mary Hostetter marked the moment by inventing a pie stacked with eighteen apples and finished in caramel and pecans, meant to look like the rocks and mud that shored up that levee. She called it the Levee High Apple Pie. It has since shown up on the Food Network, the Today Show, and in Oprah's list of favorite things, and the restaurant now serves more than 300 people a day. Nobody orders it because of the marketing. They order it because a flood is baked into the recipe.
A few doors down, NoWhere Food & Drink is the newest entry, drawing crowds within days of opening and building a following around its wing flavors first introduced at a local Wing Ding event. LaChance Winery rounds out the block, hosting the merchant association's after-hours wine walks on its patio. None of this is happening in Imperial. All of it is a five-minute drive away.
The Calendar That Actually Runs an Imperial Fall
Just yesterday, on August 15, Kimmswick closed its shops for a Poker Run Shopping Edition, sending visitors store to store for a shot at cash prizes. That's not an isolated event. It's the first entry in a run that carries through the rest of the year, each one aimed at a slightly different crowd.
| Date | Event | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 15, 2026 | Poker Run – Shopping Edition | Shoppers, day-trippers |
| Sept 26, 2026 | Young Entrepreneur Arts & Crafts Fair | Families, kids 17 and under |
| Oct 10, 2026 | Witches Night Out | Adults 21 and up |
| Oct 24-25, 2026 | Apple Butter Festival | Full-family, last weekend of October |
Ticket sales for Witches Night Out opened August 1, which means if you live in Imperial and haven't grabbed one yet, that window is already narrowing. The Apple Butter Festival closes out the run in late October, timed as it always is to the last full weekend of the month, with traditional apple butter making and local craft vendors filling the same streets that hosted the Poker Run ten weeks earlier.
None of these events happen in Imperial proper. All of them are the reason an Imperial household's fall calendar has a rhythm to it at all.
If you want something less ticketed, the standing weekly stuff is still in Imperial itself. American Legion Post 283, on Montebello Road, runs a Friday fish dinner most weeks. The Meramec Arnold Elks Lodge, at 1515 Miller Road, holds regular bingo nights. Neither shows up on a tourism site, and neither needs to. They're for people who already live here, not people passing through on their way to the pie.
The Bone Bed That's Named for the Wrong Town
Here's the detail that ties the whole thing together. Mastodon State Historic Site sits on Charles J. Becker Drive, well within Imperial's city limits. The fossil deposit at its center, one of the most significant Pleistocene ice age finds in the country, is called the Kimmswick Bone Bed. Not the Imperial Bone Bed. Kimmswick.
The naming isn't an error. It reflects the same gravitational pull that shows up in where you eat dinner. Even a 425-acre state historic site, physically located in Imperial, carries its neighbor's name because Kimmswick was the recognizable place when the bones were catalogued.
The site itself is worth the visit on its own terms. Three trails run through it. Spring Branch Trail is an easy three-quarter-mile walk along Rock Creek bottomland, passing the remains of an old springhouse fed by a spring that keeps the stream temperature constant year-round. Limestone Hill Trail is the opposite experience: a steep, rugged 2.25-mile route that climbs along a limestone bluff, cuts through oak and hickory forest, and passes an old quarry near the top. The half-mile Wildflower Trail splits the difference. The first two trailheads sit in the same picnic area, and reaching any of them means driving off the same Exit 186 that takes you into Kimmswick for dinner afterward.
What This Actually Means Week to Week
None of this is really about Kimmswick outshining Imperial. It's about how the two towns function as one unit for anyone who actually lives here, whether they think of it that way or not. Your grocery run and your drive-thru dinner happen in Imperial. Your Friday night table, your Saturday hike, and your October costume happen a few minutes down the same exit ramp.
If you're new to the area and still building your own version of this rhythm, that's the map worth having. Not "things to do near Imperial," but which exit actually holds your week together.
If you're weighing what it's like to settle into this particular stretch of Jefferson County, our Imperial neighborhood guide breaks down more of what daily life looks like here. And if a move toward this exit is somewhere on your mind, the Becky O'Neill Power Home Selling Team has spent decades getting to know exactly which side of Exit 186 fits which kind of household. Reach out when you're ready to talk through it.
