Chef Joe Shirley back on the job, behind the scenes at the Uptown Theater

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Chef Joe Shirley has a new job, one with a unique name: “happenings director” for the Uptown Theater (3700 Broadway). 

Shirley, who lost his full-time job in May when the Kansas City Club suddenly closed, has been supporting his family by catering private events and producing inventive temporary pop-up “restaurants” under his three-year-old Uberdine brand. But he needed a commercial kitchen, and his search for the right facility led him to Larry Sells, the local entrepreneur who operates the Uptown Theater building on Broadway and has been slowly developing the Uptown Shoppes, just across Valentine Road from the theater.

After a few meetings, the two developed a partnership, with Shirley now a full-time Uptown employee dedicated to the catered special events held in the 87-year-old space.

Frank Hatter, a friend of Shirley’s, remains the theater facility’s full-time executive chef. As happenings director (a title that Sells says is official “until I come up with something better”), Shirley — who says he has turned down a number of full-time restaurant jobs in recent months — takes over the smaller kitchen in the building, adjacent to the Broadway Room, an office-turned-ballroom that overlooks Broadway. He’ll use that kitchen for his own catering events and Uberdine dinners as well as to help prep the dinners created for special events by Hatter.

“I wasn’t really interested in going back to working in a restaurant kitchen,” Shirley says. “I wanted to keep on doing my own thing as long as I can.”

Sells and his business partners had Shirley create a meal in the smaller kitchen to prove his mettle. “He can do wonders in a small kitchen,” Sells says. “He passed that test with flying colors.”

Sells explains that Shirley will create a different kind of pop-up restaurant operation exclusively for the Uptown (“They’ll be much more accessible in price,” Shirley says) and help the Uptown team expand its corporate-events business. The theater currently hosts 100 corporate events each year, Sells says, and he wants that number to grow. 

“This building has a lot of rooms that aren’t generating the income they could be,” Sells says of the Uptown, which is best-known as a concert venue. “In addition to the big events we do here, we want to create Uptown Happenings. Joe will help us create a variety of new things. He’s an integral part of our team.”

Shirley has ideas (for one, he wants to sell burritos out of the drive-thru window at a nearby disused bank building), and Sells is an idea man himself, passionate about returning this stretch of Broadway — once the setting for chic restaurants and tasteful hotels — to its bygone glory. Sells is particularly interested in reviving the shopping center into a destination location with its own coffeehouse, bookstore, restaurants and art galleries. 

“Larry is a visionary,” Shirley says. “I like visionaries.”

“You see the synergy here?” Sells says.