Five time-warp restaurants in Kansas City

No, you don’t have to climb into The Time Machine to find out how Kansas City diners enjoyed a meal during a different time and place. Just walk into the city’s oldest dining room, the Savoy Grill, and you’re instantly in 1903, the year that the Savoy Hotel (which started checking in guests in 1888) opened its ground-floor restaurant.

The prices, alas, reflect the economy of 2010 all too accurately. There were other, grander hotel dining rooms in 1903 (the Baltimore Hotel’s Pompeian Room, the first air-conditioned dining venue in the city, for example), but the Savoy Grill outlasted all the competition and looks almost exactly as it did when William Henry Craddock was Kansas City’s mayor.

And what other restaurants still evoke the look and feel of an earlier decade?