Local author Judith Fertig is on a serious roll lately. Anyone can make a good cinnamon roll. A box of Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix makes the task so easy, you could almost make a serviceable roll in an Easy Bake Oven (not the kind that uses a light bulb, however; I tried!). The art comes from making the perfect cinnamon…
Dejmal Things went downhill fast for the Lake Lotawana CID. On a blustery late-October evening, a parade of SUVs, sedans and trucks weaved through the immaculately paved roads of a subdivision just south of the city of Lake Lotawana. They motored past a beige stone sign proclaiming the name of the expanse – Foxberry Estates – and down a divided…
The hype has finally given way to the reality. Ars Technica has the story of Google Fiber going live in a Kansas City, Kansas, residence yesterday. Mike Demarais, the founder of Threedee currently staying in the home, told Ars Technica that the real-world speed of the Internet has been 600-700 Mbps (megabits per second) on an Ethernet connection and 200…
Fran’s turned off the neon. The poutine has left the building. Just a month after its third anniversary, Fran’s Restaurant (11 E. 14th St.) has closed in the Power & Light District. The 24-hour diner, an import from Canada, opened in October 2009. The decor was mod, and the food was Canadian comfort: cheese curds and gravy over fries and…
Truckily Kean (left) and Berkland keep on trucking. Derek Kean and Matthew Berkland were hungry. With a few spare hours to fill after a tech conference in San Francisco, the pair set out to explore one of the nation’s leading food-truck scenes. The only problem was that they couldn’t find any trucks. “We weren’t from there. We didn’t know where…
It’s a fact: A book about Abraham Lincoln is published every 15 minutes. In the nearly 150 years since he was assassinated, so much has been written about the 16th U.S. president that 27 such volumes are just about his hatbands. Yet there’s still appetite enough that Bill O’Reilly can slap his name on a $28 errata-rama about the Great…
The small She & Her Productions has taken on this month’s other production of a Pulitzer-winning drama, this one a rock musical that picked up three Tony Awards. Next to Normal (book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, music by Tom Kitt), directed by Tiffany Garrison-Schweigert, arrives on the heels of the touring Broadway show, which came through Kansas City in…
Hunger for land dominates history, right up to the present day. And that drive to stake territory is the force behind the long, violent Kentucky Cycle. Robert Schenkkan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning saga tells two centuries of a sadly American story, with nine one-act plays unfolding across two productions that total nearly seven hours. It doesn’t feel quite that long sitting through…
It’s like watching the lions eat the Christians,” says Dale Knoop, founder of the fundraising app RAZ Mobile. The 52-year-old entrepreneur and Sprint veteran is a relentlessly upbeat guy, and he sounds sunny even pronouncing this opinion. He can afford to — he’s only talking about Monday’s Chiefs game in Pittsburgh. “I’ve got Heath Miller,” he says, naming the Steelers…
Tim Sylvester’s pride and joy is a pair of flat, gray slabs of concrete on northbound Interstate 35, between the Gardner Drive and city of Gardner exits. The 31-year-old founder and sole employee of Integrated Roadways talks about his company’s precast modular pavement as one would a wunderkind kid brother. “If you go out there looking for them, you’re not…
Brian Gruber found himself in a room full of fans during an early October gathering of developers and visionaries at the Kauffman Foundation’s 1 Million Cups. The founder of Lucky Orange was explaining his startup, which provides a suite of tools for real-time Web analytics, when a couple of his clients professed their love of Lucky Orange and pledged to…
Maybe you have the kind of eyes that give you away. Now, though, your eyes — specifically, the blood vessels in the whites of your eyes — might keep all your secrets. “Each section of the white of your eye is the equivalent of a fingerprint,” says Toby Rush, EyeVerify CEO and founder. “It’s like four fingerprints staring at you.”…
Who are the best fans in the nation? The question has been debated on bar stools and message boards across the country, with no clear scientific answer. Until now. So say Hunter Browning and Will Coatney, whose Fannect app may at last definitively rank the most devoted fanbases in sports — and determine every pro team and university’s No. 1…
This is the meat of our operation,” AgLocal co-founder Naithan Jones jokes as he descends into the basement of the Historic Theatre Building in Mission. Meat is the backbone of Jones’ startup, AgLocal, an online platform connecting producers, wholesalers and retailers of humanely produced meats. About 200 farms, distributors and retailers across the United States have already signed up. Jones…
There has to be a better way. Those seven words unite the entrepreneurs featured in our Innovation Issue, part of The Pitch’s ongoing effort to tell the stories of Kansas City’s big thinkers and doers. Each of these startups has come up with a better way to do something that most of us take for granted, and we’re talking to…
I was in New York City the night Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. It seems impossible that I would experience a bigger party in my lifetime — hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, cheering, chanting, dancing, crying, hugging, smiling. I must have given out a thousand high-fives. When Obama was re-elected president this November, I was…
Unassuming in its execution and devoid of any overarching theme, Overlook is exactly the kind of exhibition that’s easy to, well, overlook. But that would be a mistake. Gallerist Andrew Lyles and photographer Ah-ram Park have selected 10 photographs by six local and regional artists, and their straightforward installation allows each work to make a separate case for itself. Every…
Fresh off their first European tour, localish roots-rockers Ha Ha Tonka set up at RecordBar for a homecoming show the night before Thanksgiving. The Pitch recently engaged in a trans-Atlantic correspondence with drummer Lennon Bone in anticipation of the gig. The Pitch: It seems like rootsy Americana bands from the United States go over really well in Europe. Are you…
Supersuckers, with Cherokee Rock Rifle and Radkey An anomaly on the late 1990s Sub Pop gravy train, Supersuckers was cheekier and rowdier than its more artfully conscious labelmates. Grunge, punk, classic rock and, later, country, all filtered into the band’s sound, but only to serve the group’s primary intent: rocking with its collective cock out. Local openers Cherokee Rock Rifle…
Brooklyn is roughly 1,100 miles from Kansas City, but there’s a shortcut: Giuliano Monetti Jr.’s restaurant, in Lee’s Summit. His year-old Monetti’s Taste of Italy feels like a tribute to the Bensonhurst neighborhood where he grew up. He might have called the place Monetti’s Taste of Brooklyn. Monetti has an accent thicker than a slab of the lasagna here (his…
Monetti’s Taste of Italy is bringing a bit of Brooklyn to Lee’s Summit with oversized portions, live music and an old family recipe for lasagna. Photos by Angela C. Bond.
