A star deserves marquee billing, and James Beard Award–winning Michael Smith gets it with the two-month-old Cocobolos, in the PrairieFire complex at 135th Street and Nall. “Cocobolos by Michael Smith” is how the restaurant is billed on its menus, in line with Smith’s status as an iconic local eponym. The Overland Park place joins, of course, his namesake restaurant at…
There’s no shortage of media outlets covering the Kansas City area: The Kansas City Star, KCUR 89.3, the Business Journal, four TV stations, hyperlocal operations such as Prairie Village Post and Northeast News, gossipy blogs like Tony’s Kansas City and KC Confidential. The Pitch, of course. But as media fortunes have been reduced by the challenges of monetizing the news…
Over the past two decades, the Missouri Constitution has become a whiteboard, easily altered with the prevailing political winds. Some amendments are understandable: Thanks to the 11th Amendment, no one can be jailed for being in debt. Other amendments have been lost to time, like allowing women to be dismissed from jury duty by simple request. In 2004, that year’s…
This is the first installment of I Will Dare, a regular column in which writer Angela Lutz accepts random death-defying challenges. After climbing 264 stairs to the top of Schlitterbahn Waterpark’s Verrückt, the world’s tallest water slide, there are two ways down. One, of course, is to rocket to the bottom on a rubber raft at nearly 65 miles per…
As expected the AL Central has more or less been a one-team race. The Detroit Tigers came into the season with a stacked pitching rotation and lineup, and are currently five games up on the next closest team in the division. That team is the Kansas City Royals who sit at 53-51. They’re hoping to make it more competitive in…
The epic Motley Crue and Alice Cooper tour is hitting the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri this Sunday August 3rd. The average price for Motley Crue tickets for this show is $184.39 which is slightly below the tour average of $191.83. Ticket prices set for floor seating start at $159 while the cheapest get in price for the show can be found at…
Tonight at the KC Library Central branch. One of the more enjoyable New Yorker pieces I’ve read in the last year or so is “Pedigree,” by Walter Kirn. It’s a memoir of sorts about Kirn — the author of Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, both of which have been adapted into critically acclaimed films — and his relationship with…
The rails of the pro-streetcar campaign are being greased with mutli-thousand-dollar checks from real-estate firms, advertising companies, law firms, engineering companies and trade groups. Connect KC, the campaign committee charged with running the pro-streetcar extension campaign, reeled in $178,565 in contributions in the last reporting period, records with the Missouri Ethics Commission show. The committee previously had raised $82,767, bringing…
The Pitch Music Awards Show is at the Uptown Theater this Sunday, August 3, and hosted by World Air Guitar Champion Eric “Mean” Melin and Mills Record Co.’s Judy Mills (tickets here). To count down to the awards ceremony – and help introduce you to this year’s picks – we’re debuting a “song of the day” each weekday until the show from…
Nick Waterhouse looks like he just stepped off the set of an early Mad Men episode: trim suit, slicked-back hair, vintage-looking glasses. His sound is plenty retro, too. On his latest full-length, Holly, the Los Angeles singer and guitarist packs plenty of swinging horns and brassy R&B notes into his songs. It’s a deliciously smooth record, the kind you might…
I feel it’s obligatory, when touring a county fair, to at least make a brief pilgrimage to see the winners of the 4-H animal competitions. Last weekend, at the annual Wyandotte County Fair, I paid homage to all the farm animals. Don’t ask me why the pigs, chickens, rabbits and lambs receive the blue ribbons and various titles. But I…
When Troost Avenue had a streetcar line, in the first half of the last century, it had dozens of small, independently owned restaurants, cafes and cafeterias. Now, if you don’t count the fast-food outlets, the pickings for any dining venue are pretty spartan. And recently, another culinary entrepreneur on the city’s historic dividing line has called it quits: Ubuntu Cafe at 4327…
The Pitch is looking for members to join its Bite Club. Sorry, vampires. This isn’t that kind of Bite Club. Our Bite Club lets you eat for free at a local restaurant once a month. Here’s how it works: Bite Club members meet at a local restaurant to sample dishes. Again, you eat for free, and once the meal is over,…
June 22 was a day for residents of Kansas City and elsewhere to enjoy Cliff Drive, which in the Historic Northeast is one of the city’s few natural outdoor treasures. That summer day marked the return of the on-again, off-again Cliff Drive bicycle race that makes up one day of the annual Tour of Kansas City race series that brings…
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah with Mat Shoare The Riot Room, Kansas City Sunday, July 27, 2014 In the mid-aughts, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was the indie-rock band that everyone was talking about. The Brooklyn quintet’s 2005 self-titled debut was an explosive success, but when subsequent releases failed to inspire the same love in critics and disappointed fans, CYHSY…
Kansas: Where abortion is less of a right than in other places. Aid for Women, an abortion clinic at 720 Central Avenue, in Kansas City, Kansas, ceased operations last Friday, according to its website. That leaves three functioning abortion clinics for the roughly 3 million people inside the 81,000 square miles of the state of Kansas. The official word on…
The Pitch Music Awards Show is at the Uptown Theater this Sunday, August 3, and hosted by World Air Guitar Champion Eric “Mean” Melin and Mills Record Co.’s Judy Mills (tickets here). To count down to the awards ceremony – and help introduce you to this year’s picks – we’re debuting a “song of the day” each weekday until the show from…
There is plenty to love about Sara Jean Kelly’s dusky voice. It’s a sultry, calloused thing, built to deliver a fine twang. The singer is a born-and-bred Nashville native, daughter to country star Irene Kelly, so Americana is in her blood. But songs like “Cowboy” and “Last One to Know” also suggest a crossover versatility that should enable Kelly to…
The Pitch Music Showcase Night No. 2 A.J. Gaither, the Pedaljets, Katy Guillen and the Girls, the Grisly Hand, Not A Planet Knuckleheads, Kansas City Friday, July 25, 2014 More photos from last night here. A.J. Gaither could have played the full six and a half hours of The Pitch Music Showcase Night No. 2 if we would have let him….
Photos by Zach Bauman
When three of the five original members of a band abandon ship, is it still technically the same band? Do you keep the original name and soldier on, or do you call it a day and stake out some new project? Perhaps these questions did not occur to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Alec Ounsworth, who, when faced with the…
