Blackthorn Pub & Pizza has been a fixture in the Tower Grove neighborhood of South St. Louis City since 1986. It’s the kind of place where you order a heavy slice of deep dish, grab a pitcher, and lose an hour to skee-ball while it bakes.
Blackthorn came under new ownership in 2024, and the new stewards of the brand approached Wild Operation for a website rebuild. The goal was to capture that feeling — a neighborhood institution with decades of history — without making the site feel dated.
Building on the brand’s history
One fun part of this project started in Blackthorn’s basement. Blackthorn found some old printed pieces with an old logo and character tucked away downstairs. We pulled design cues from those vintage assets and worked them into the look of the new site, from the typography to the bird character.
While we wanted to modernize the website with online ordering through Toast and party room reservations, tying into this history was just as important. People love Blackthorn for what it is, so honoring the old pub vibe was key.
Letting the space speak for itself
Blackthorn is a place you want to come hang out, so the site needed to show that. We built the layout around photography of the bar, the dining rooms, and the games — shuffleboard, skee-ball, pinball, arcade cabinets, and a TV in every room. The images show off the neighborhood pub vibe that people have enjoyed for decades.
Keeping the daily specials front and center
A neighborhood pub lives on its regulars, and the regulars come for the rhythm of the week: Michelob Mondays, Two Hearted Tuesdays, Wheat Wednesdays, Throwback Thursdays, and Suds & Slices on the weekends. We gave the daily specials a clear, prominent spot on the site so they’re easy to find and easy for the Blackthorn team to update as things change.
Showing off the menu
Online ordering is handled through Toast, but we wanted to showcase the menu on the site itself as well.
Blackthorn is known for its deep dish — the “heavy slice” that’s worth the wait — but they also do a thin crust. We built the menu page to display the full lineup with photography, so the food sells itself.
A reservation system for the party room
Blackthorn’s party room is a big part of the business, and booking it used to mean phone calls and back-and-forth. We solved that with the same custom reservation system we also built for Epiphany Lanes — a plugin that sits on top of Gravity Forms and handles the specific logic a party-room booking needs, rather than the generic contact form or an expensive third-party booking system.
Reusing that foundation meant Blackthorn got a proven, reliable booking tool. Guests can request the party room online, the team can manage bookings without the phone tag, and the whole thing fits naturally into the rest of the site.
Built on WordPress, easy to manage
Like most of the sites we build, Blackthorn runs on WordPress with a custom theme. That gives the team a familiar editor for updating specials, swapping photos, and adjusting hours, and it gives us a stable, well-supported platform to maintain over the long haul.
What we set out to do
Blackthorn already had the hard part figured out — almost forty years of good food and good vibes. Our job was to build a website that lives up to that reputation: one that looks like the place feels, makes the menu and specials easy to find, and gives the team tools they’ll actually use. That’s the kind of project we love — taking a St. Louis business with real character and giving it a home online that does it justice.
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