Every Thursday is ‘National Eclair Day’ for baker Chelsea Williams. Chelsea Williams is performing again. You can see her most days at the Opera House Food & Coffee Emporium at 500 Walnut, in the building that’s still called the Gillis Opera House, even though it clearly isn’t a theater of any kind. The real Gillis Opera House – one of…
Debbie Gold opens her Red Door Grill in Leawood. Here’s a peek, courtesy of Pitch photographer Angela C. Bond.
Westport institution the Corner Restaurant returns better than ever. Take a look at what’s on the menu with photos by Angela C. Bond.
Facebook: Barley’s There’s plenty of beer choices at the new Barley’s. Barley’s Brewhaus (5041 West 135th Street) will begin pouring cold ones on Monday in Leawood. The new brewpub has a pair of patios and a horseshoe-shaped bar with three stainless-steel beer towers that hold 66 taps. The menu includes the new micro-plates section (available at all three locations), which…
Mio: an Italian Pizzeria The pizza oven is open. When Charles Ferruzza reviewed Mio: an Italian Trattoria (4800 West 135th Street, Suite 170, Leawood) in October of last year, he saw that chef and owner Julian Viso had the early makings of a model that could be replicated. And hidden within that review was the spark (pizza dough) behind Viso’s…
Whole Foods will be opening an outpost in Olathe. The grocery chain received site-plan approval from the Olathe Planning Commission in February for a Whole Foods Market in the Olathe Point Shopping Center at 119th Street and Black Bob Road. At that meeting, Polsinell’s John Petersen told the Planning Commission that it was realistic to expect the project would break…
In its best moments, Joss Whedon’s modern-dress movie version of Much Ado About Nothing seems most like what it is: a house-party lark among old friends who have decided to perform Shakespeare rather than dust off the Twister or find the croquet mallets. That’s pretty much how it seems in its worst moments, too. Shot in 12 days just after…
By the time Harvey Levin sat down on the cultural toilet to drop TMZ on us, Sofia Coppola’s career as a writer and director was well under way. But the three movies she has made since the celebrity-gossip clearinghouse’s 2005 arrival, starting with the next year’s Marie Antoinette, are oddly difficult to imagine in a world without TMZ — not…
Zombie movies are, at heart, disaster movies. The horror they exploit is not so much of the “Boo!” variety, but rather that of society in full collapse. So it’s perhaps surprising that Marc Forster’s World War Z feels, at times, like the first zombie movie to go full apocalypse on us. Rather than confine its story to one representative corner…
Mindi Love has an encyclopedic memory of Johnson County’s history. Off the top of her head, she can say what year Country Club Plaza developer J.C. Nichols completed his studies at the old Olathe High School. As she leads a tour through the narrow corridors of the Johnson County Museum of History’s cramped Shawnee house, she summons facts about Johnson…
The space is a speakeasy that has hosted jazz since politicians gathered here for drinks during Prohibition. The trumpeter is one of KC’s young jazz lions, expanding the music’s reach with sounds from an earlier generation: hip-hop and Michael Jackson. Hermon Mehari’s trumpet — blowing an Ellington standard, a Charlie Parker bebop or a more contemporary tune — breathes fresh,…
Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, SoundCloud and the like have made discovering new music easy, but it wasn’t so long ago that the process took real effort. You had to visit a record store, maybe pore over some music magazines. Or, if you were into punk rock, you’d keep an eye on your favorite distro. Distros were mail-order repositories of independent music…
It feels like a purely objective statement to say the Pedaljets’ two-fisted new album, What’s in Between, is the band’s best. It has all the studio sophistication that the band might have wished for on its promising 1987 debut, Today Today, and it recovers the pop sensibility left behind on its self-titled 1990 follow-up, after which the group disbanded. The…
Huey Lewis and the News Is it truly, as Huey Lewis and the News once declared, hip to be square? This event might shed some light on the matter. The group is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its (classic?) album Sports. Here, it plays the UMB Big Bash, a benefit for the Drumm Farm Center for Children and the Turner…
Not long after the Red Door Grill opened in Leawood last month, chef Debbie Gold — the James Beard Award winner and reality-TV star — overheard two customers talking about her in the dining room. “Debbie Gold left the American Restaurant,” one woman said to her dining companion, “to make hamburgers?” It’s not quite that simple, but yes, at her…
Out with one icon, in with another. It’s out with the old, in with the new on the side of 1712 Main, the building that long featured a painted advertisement for Boulevard and the Roasterie. Last week, work began on whitewashing over the ad, and this week new paint started going up – advertising the 2013 MLS All-Star Game. Sporting…
No dunking necessary. The cookies are preloaded in the bottle. Summer drinks are like camp romances – you hang on to them a little too long and forget about them by the time the leaves change. I had a brief dalliance with an Oreo Cream Blast – the novelty of a cookie milkshake being sold at a movie theater seems…
Facebook: Urban Grown Farms & Gardens Tour Pov Huns and his flowers should be a Sunday stop for you. We can go ahead and mark 2013 as the year when urban agriculture reached a tipping point in Kansas City. Because this is the year when it has become pretty much physically impossible to actually visit every site on Cultivate Kansas…
Alan Ashurst is the dumper hunter. Code Enforcement Officer Alan Ashurst asks me if I have insurance. I chuckle. “That’s a serious question,” he says. As I’m about to step on a pile of heroin needles, he adds, “Watch your step.” Ashurst cruises the East Side in a city-issued, white Ford Focus, looking for signs of illegal dumping. He stops…
Facebook: Pie Five Pie Five will open by the end of the summer. Pie Five Pizza Co., and its promise of a 9-inch custom pie made in just five minutes, will be opening in the former iEats location at 13366 Metcalf in Overland Park by the end of the summer. The fast-casual pizza joint serves up cookie pies alongside its…
Photo by Sabrina Staires Name: Jerry Rapp Occupation: President, CinemaKC Hometown: Kansas City, Missouri Current neighborhood: The Crossroads Who or what is your sidekick? My beagle-dachshund mix, Maddie What career would you choose in an alternate reality? Astronomer What was the last local restaurant you patronized? Open Fire Pizza Categories: News Tags: Cinema KC, Jerry Rapp, Kansas City, kansas city
Monsters University is a rare cinematic creature: a prequel nobody asked for that turns out to be a summer godsend. Somebody at Disney or Pixar thought it would be a good idea to make an origin story for the characters from 2001’s quirky Monsters, Inc., following the hardworking bogeymen during their college years. Pixar, an animation studio that rarely dives…
Aixois bartender David Dillistin has a Parisian cocktail for you this weekend. This weekend, chef Emmanual Langlade and his wife, Megan – as well as the entire staff of the Aixois Brasserie at 1006 Walnut – will be in celebration mode. Proving the naysayers wrong, the Aixois Brasserie will fete the first anniversary of the downtown boite this Friday and…
Boulevard Boulevard’s collaboration with Sierra Nevada is out this week. Humankind can finally swallow the earth with this week’s release of Terra Incognita, Boulevard Brewing Co. and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s barrel-aged collaboration. The dark-brown ale is named after uncharted lands and the California Trail, which separates the breweries. Boulevard brewmaster Steven Pauwels says the dry, hop-forward Smokestack Series brew…
