Riding along with the Traveling Cocktail Club

• Ashford Stamper
• The Traveling Cocktail Club created the cocktail pairings for chef Craig Howard’s dinner at the City Arts Project gallery last Sunday night.

The northwest corner of 20th Street and Main emerged in 2011 as a sort of mini culinary epicenter of Kansas City. The Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange quickly came into its own as a smart destination for fresh, progressive plates. Down in the Rieger’s basement, the pseudo speakeasy and pioneering mixology lounge Manifesto reasserted its reputation for shaking and stirring the tastiest cocktails in town. And most weekend nights, the silver Port Fonda food truck could be found camped out in the parking lot, bumping hip-hop over its speakers and serving upscale Mexican street food to a tottering line of eager customers.

It’s easy to forget that the spot was more or less a dead zone for almost an entire year prior to this renaissance. Manifesto, which opened in 2009, was forced to close when 1924 Main, the restaurant upstairs that preceded the Rieger, abruptly shuttered in early 2010. (Their liquor licenses were connected.)

“When we went on hiatus in 2010, we tried to keep the Manifesto brand alive a little bit,” says Beau Williams, general manager at Manifesto. “[Owner] Ryan [Maybee] and I started this thing called the Traveling Cocktail Club, where we’d set up at different bars around town for a night. So we’d come and serve craft-oriented cocktails at Pierpont’s or BRGR or Justus Drugstore. But then with the Rieger opening, and Manifesto opening back up, we kind of naturally stopped doing it.”