Jerry’s Cafe in south Kansas City has a new owner
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This morning, a diner at the compact Jerry’s Cafe, at 1209 West 103rd Street, walked over to the table where Nick DeFeo was sitting with his parents.
“I understand that you’re the new owner here,” the man said. “Please don’t change anything. It’s perfect like it is.”
DeFeo, the 34-year-old former cook at the former M&S Grill (and, still, a salesman for a local spice company), wholeheartedly agreed with the customer. Since purchasing the five-year-old diner on June 27, DeFeo is operating on the theory that what isn’t broken doesn’t need to be fixed.
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Jerry Naster, the former butcher who opened the original Jerry’s Woodwether Cafe in the West Bottoms, decided to retire and, meeting one afternoon with DeFeo, his spice salesman, encouraged DeFeo to buy the 55-seat restaurant.
“I went home to sleep on the idea,” DeFeo tells me. “I have two very young daughters. I’d like to increase my income. I told my wife — who thought I was out of my mind at first — and a month later, I bought it.”
DeFeo, who says he shadowed Naster for the first three weeks of the transition, never had to shut down the restaurant, which serves breakfast and lunch six days a week. Many of the regulars are just now discovering that Naster is gone and DeFeo is the new boss.
If the DeFeo name has a familiar ring, the former family business — DeFeo Produce Co. — was a fixture in the City Market for more than a century. Nick’s great-great-grandfather John DeFeo started selling produce shortly after he arrived here from Sicily, in 1895. The DeFeo family sold the business in 2013.
A graduate of the culinary programs of Johnson & Wales University and also has a degree in hospitality management from Florida International University, DeFeo returned to Kansas City about a decade ago to open a now-defunct Italian fast-casual restaurant franchise. After that, he began cooking at the newly opened M&S Grill. He left that position to become a spice salesman for Florida-based R.L. Schreiber. It’s a job he’s planning to hold onto, at least for now.
“I have a great cook, Derwyn Cage, and an exceptional staff,” DeFeo says. “This place runs like a machine whether I’m here or not, although I’m here every morning.”
The only change that DeFeo is seriously contemplating: taking down the whiteboards listing the numerous daily specials and replacing them with table-tent cards.
Oh, and DeFeo is now making his own sausage for the restaurant. “It now tastes more Italian,” he says. “A little bit more seasoned.”
Would a spice salesman have it any other way?
