Goodbye Yahooz, Hello Coyote Grill

It’s official: Before the end of this month, the PB&J “cowboy” restaurant, Yahooz, in Leawood’s Town Center, will be known under a different, but familiar name.

Yahooz, which began serving “contemporary cowboy cuisine” in February of 1998, when PB&J opened the venue, has reportedly seen too many months of flat sales. The restaurant will close for a few days to re-vamp the interior, remove all vestiges of the Yahoo brand, and re-open in mid-February as the Coyote Grill.

If the name Coyote Grill has a ring to it: It’s the Southwestern-style restaurant that PB&J founders Paul Khoury and Bill Crooks opened in the new Mission Center Mall in 1989. It was the second restaurant in the Kansas City-based chain and one of my personal favorites. After a decade of popularity, the Coyote Grill closed a few months before Mission Center Mall was shuttered — and ultimately razed — in 2006. 

Although there will be traditional Tex-Mex style dishes on the Coyote Grill menu, there won’t be any references to the restaurant as serving Mexican cuisine since Town Center already has a Mexican restaurant on the property: an outpost of powerhouse corporation Brinker International’s modestly priced On the Border Mexican Grill. 

There’s another Mexican restaurant across the street from the new Coyote Grill. Right across Roe, in the Camelot Court shopping complex, there’s the small, unpretentious Cactus Grill. The names of the two restaurants might sound a little similar, but trust me, no one will ever get the two mixed up.