Au Revoir, Patrick Quillec?
A couple of months ago, there was a rumor flying around Kansas City — as fast as the Concorde, actually — that French-born restaurateur Patrick Quillec (Hannah Bistro, Cafe Provence, Cassis) had run away for good. The rumor started after Quillec’s upscale bistro, Cassis, had closed at Leawood’s Town Center and he had, by all reports, left town.
It’s true, Cassis did close last year and Quillec did leave: He was hired by the owners of an inn in Massachussetts to turn an existing restaurant into a French-style brasserie. When that project was completed, Quillec said, he returned to Kansas City and his wife Joanne and their six children. Well, most of them — Quillec’s eldest son Phillip, who was one of the chefs in the Cassis kitchen, is now married and lives most of the year in Brazil and Argentina.
A few days ago, the next child in the Quillec brood, Elizabeth, presented Patrick and Joanne with their second grandchild. Daughter Natalie works — with Quillec’s wife, brother and sister-in-law — at Cafe Provence in Prairie Village. Cafe Provence, which is owned by Joanne Quillec, is the only restaurant of the many that Quillec has opened over the last decade that’s still in business. No wonder he’s pleased that his next son, Noah, is more interested in music and composing than in cooking.
The closings of those restaurants are still painful to Quillec, although he says he only truly mourned over the loss of the first one, the cozy Hannah Bistro on 39th Street. Quillec named that venue after his third daughter, Hannah (now a 16-year-old gymnast and a student at Shawnee Mission East) and its popularity jump-started his career. While building up the Hannah Bistro brand, the Quillec family kept growing: daughter Sophia was born in 1995.
After being forced out of the original Hannah (which closed in 2003), Quillec kept aiming to repeat that early success, opening another Hannah Bistro in a Lee’s Summit hotel and later turning another of his culinary concepts, Cafe Paris in Overland Park, into a Hannah Bistro. Neither of those Hannahs hung on.
“The Lee’s Summit one was a trial,” Quillec says. “We had so many customers from that area asking for one, it seemed like a good opportunity. But the hotel isn’t even there anymore!”
As for Cafe Paris — located where the Overland Park D’Bronx is now — Quillec thinks it was the right concept but guillotined by the anti-French sentiment that erupted after France refused to join the fighting in Iraq — remember “Freedom Fries?” Turning Cafe Paris into Hannah Bistro helped business, but it never rebounded to profitability.
The most recent Quillec restaurant to close, Cassis, was — Quillec says — the combination of a bad economy and the wrong location. “It seemed like the right location, with 40 Sardines across the street and so many restaurants opening in the area. But it wasn’t.”
Quillec isn’t quite sure what he’ll do for his next act. “I’d like to run a restaurant on an island in the Caribbean,” he says, “or in bigger city like Chicago or New York. If I stayed in Kansas City, the only neighborhood where I would consider putting in a new restaurant would be the Country Club Plaza. It has a steady customer base.”
If he did stay in Kansas City, Quillec would move away from the bistro concept and open an inexpensive creperie. “But ultimately, we’ll all end up in France,” Quillec says. Until then, we can save the rumors. — By Charles Ferruzza
