Goodbye Harvey House?
| Is the Harvey House Diner on its way out? |
A little over a month after Union Station hosted a lecture by author Stephen Fried, discussing his new biography of legendary restaurateur Fred Harvey, the facility may be tossing Harvey’s namesake restaurant off the tracks.
Today the Kansas City Star’s Joyce Smith quoted Union Station’s CEO George Guestello saying that the space currently occupied by the Harvey House Diner — a recreation that looks remarkably like the original Harvey House in its heyday, roughly from 1914 to the late 1950s — “will probably not be a restaurant in the future.”
According to the article, Guestello — who is desperately trying to stop the flow of red ink at Union Station — is reportedly leasing at least part of the Harvey House space to the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce and the Kansas City Area Redevelopment Council.
Yes, it’s sad news for the Harvey House Diner, which recently stopped serving breakfast. But it’s not surprising. The diner has been run in recent years by PB&J Restaurant Inc., which never managed to change this restaurant’s lingering reputation for overpriced and inconsistent meals and terrible service.
Fred Harvey must be rolling in his grave.
