Jonathan Justus’ Black Dirt headed to KC this year

It has been an open secret for months that Jonathan Justus, the James Beard Award-nominated chef and co-owner of Justus Drugstore, is planning to open a second restaurant in Kansas City … somewhere.

Justus isn’t quite ready to say just what zip code he’s after for the place — to be called Black Dirt — but he tells me that he’s in the final stages of negotiating the lease. The space, he says, is “south of the Plaza.”

The restaurant isn’t going to be Justus 2.0. 

He expects it to be more casual than Drugstore, without de-emphasizing its farm-to-table ethos. How casual? Justus says the menu will include fried chicken, though it’s a fried-chicken recipe he has been working on for years.