Hamburger Mary’s readies for its move to midtown

It has been a dramatic year for the Hamburger Mary’s franchises in Missouri. Earlier this month, the two-year-old Hamburger Mary’s restaurant in St. Louis closed after the venue’s landlord lost the building in foreclosure. (The owners reportedly are looking for a new location.) Closer to home, the owners of the five-year-old Hamburger Mary’s in the Crossroads — Jeff Edmondson and Eric Christensen of ECCO Holdings — say they’ve had their own landlord issues at 101 Southwest Boulevard. They announced last November that they would move in 2014.

The LGBT-friendly restaurant is still operating out of the purple building in the heart of the Crossroads District, but by November, Edmondson and Christensen expect to reopen inside the Uptown Theater, about 17 blocks south.

That means Hamburger Mary’s is taking the space formerly occupied by the Conspiracy Room, a nightclub run by Uptown Theater owner Larry Sells. Edmondson and Christensen have already been running a smaller saloon, Industry Video Bar, inside the 86-year-old former movie house.

Industry has a gay following: Actor Damron Armstrong hosts a Broadway show-tunes night on Wednesdays, and at least one night a month is devoted to Kansas City’s bear community. But Edmondson is quick to say it’s not a gay bar. “It has a largely gay clientele,” he says, “but the days of the strictly gay-only bar are over.” (So is the Bear Bust, a bears event that started at Hamburger Mary’s but isn’t coming to the new restaurant.)

The fact that heterosexual patrons embraced Kansas City’s first Hamburger Mary’s (the original restaurant opened in San Francisco in 1972) wasn’t a complete surprise to Edmondson and Christensen.

“We knew there would be a mixed clientele from visiting some of the locations in other cities,” Edmondson says. “What we didn’t expect was what a large percentage of our patrons would be heterosexual. Our typical ratio, for the dining clientele, is 80 percent straight and 20 percent gay.”

That’s most obvious on Sundays, during the drag brunch hosted by Daisy Buckët. “Daisy asks the people in the dining room to raise their hands if they’re gay, raise their hands if they’re straight,” Edmondson says. “It’s almost always a primarily straight crowd.”

Hamburger Mary’s International, the franchise system (with offices in Chicago and West Hollywood), describes the restaurant concept as the original operation did: “an open-air bar & grill for open-minded people.”

The question is whether 37th Street and Broadway is as open-minded as the artsy Crossroads. It should be — this stretch of midtown has been home to LGBT bars since the 1960s.

“That’s one of the reasons we like this neighborhood,” Edmondson says. “It does have a long history of being a hub for Kansas City’s LGBT community, and we’d like to bring back some of that energy. This neighborhood has come a long way in a decade.”

Edmondson says ECCO Holdings has more in store than just the Hamburger Mary’s move. “We have a plan to open a gay sports bar across the street,” he says. “And maybe some other concepts.”

The new Hamburger Mary’s will be configured differently from the one in the Crossroads. “Everything — bar and dining area — will be in one room,” Edmondson says. “But there will be two levels of dining and one large bar that span the size of the building. The new place won’t be quite so overboard in style. We’ll have a little of the old kitschiness, but we’re really going for a more sophisticated look.”

Instead of a second-floor deck, a popular gathering place on First Fridays in the Crossroads, the Hamburger Mary’s on Broadway will have an enclosed, street-level patio that could, depending on permits, be open before winter.

One thing not changing is the menu, which remains mostly burgers, salads and traditional comfort foods.

“People like having a choice of cuisines to choose from in the metro,” Edmondson says. “Italian, Thai, Chinese, gay.”