Room 39 in Leawood updates its look, banishes stuffiness

Most restaurants, as they edge toward the 10-year mark, need some kind of change. Sometimes a subtle cosmetic makeover is in order. Sometimes a complete personality change would be better.

The eight-year-old Room 39, at 10561 Mission, in Leawood’s Mission Farm development, didn’t need a physical or spiritual overhaul, but its recently completed remodel (on the heels of last winter’s update to the midtown original) is an undeniable improvement all the same.

Chef Ted Habiger — who co-owns both the Leawood venue and the one at 1719 West 39th Street with his wife, Jackie — did much of the work himself over the 11 days that the restaurant was closed. From June 29 to July 9, the Habigers did a major number on the dining room, tearing down walls and removing … tablecloths?

“A friend of mine, a chef, told me that he was coming in to eat dinner one night,” Ted Habiger tells me, “and the sight of the tablecloths made him a little embarrassed because he was casually dressed in shorts. That’s not the impression we want to get across. We’re welcoming to everyone. This is not a stuffy place. I’m not a stuffy person, and my food isn’t stuffy.”

Stuffy is a word that came up more than once in my 2008 review of this restaurant, and it seems to have stuck with Habiger. He says he was never completely happy with the original interior of the Leawood Room 39, which was sleek and sterile compared with the original’s bohemian intimacy. Seven years later, though, the younger spot should please the chef, his regulars out south, and anyone else who happens in. The makeover banishes the most formal components — window curtains, recessed lighting, darker paint colors — in favor of a more accessible room with a view into the kitchen. There are new light fixtures, a paler color palette, and frosted transom windows. And now the tables are uncloaked.

“We’re keeping the tablecloths at the midtown Room 39,” Habiger says. “That place is so raw and rustic, they work better there.”

The midtown Room 39’s remodel was inspired by necessity: There was a leak under the bar, and while repairing it, Habiger saw an opportunity to narrow the bar, install new light fixtures in the dining room and over the bar, refinish the hardwood floors (darker, with a matte finish), and repaint the trim and at least one wall. Ted and Jackie Kincaid Habiger had bought out their original partner, chef Andy Sloan, the previous year, so those changes also marked a transition. “We wanted to make these businesses our own,” Ted Habiger says.

“And then,” he adds, “it was time to give Leawood some love.”

Mission Farms has changed over the past eight years, too — another reason that a change was due, Habiger says.

“When we first moved into this location, there wasn’t a lot of competition out here,” he says. “There is now. And restaurants have gotten a lot sexier. They reflect, more and more, our lives and how we live those lives. This is no time to put off customers. It’s time to show the world a nice, shiny new face.”

If the midtown Room 39 is an urban bistro, Habiger says, the Leawood Room 39 has more in common with a French brasserie.  “A brasserie is a little fancier, but a vibrant and happening place.”

To fortify that Gallic connection, Habiger arranged to have the restaurant’s bar topped with zinc, the metal most identified with bars in Parisian workingman cafes and neighborhood bistros. (When Elaine Sciolino wrote her “Ode to the Classic Bistro” in The New York Times last year, she praised “a zinc-topped bar with a heavy wood frame.”) He also created a wine cabinet, to one side of the bar, out of an antique bureau. “It’s over 100 years old and came from an old church,” he says.

Habiger says he has been pleased with the feedback he’s getting from the interior changes. “Our customers either like it or say, ‘But you didn’t change anything,'” he says. “I consider both of those to be compliments.”