Kansas City has always been welcoming to gay diners
As of today, same-sex couples in Missouri will be able to legally marry. But Kansas City already has a long history of welcoming the LGBT community to its restaurants as both patrons and employees. Unlike many Midwestern cities of its size, Kansas City has a tradition of gay-owned, gay-friendly restaurants, dating back at least to the 1960s.
Some of them didn’t last very long — does anyone remember the short-lived Sarah Crankankles and its drag-queen waitresses? — but others, like the original Corner Restaurant in Westport (opened by Stephen Friedman in 1980 and opened again by different people not long ago), live on.
The long-razed Arabian Nights lounge (located where the midtown Costco store stands now) served food. So did a gay bar called the Kon Tiki, which hosted a weekly fried-chicken night. Fried chicken was also the featured dish at another venue with an equally brief, but more recent, lifespan, Opal’s Kitchen.
Jeff Edmondson, the co-owner of the five-year-old Hamburger Mary’s restaurant (in the Uptown Theater building at 3700 Broadway), won’t typecast his venue as a gay restaurant: “We just say that we’re an open-minded restaurant for open-minded people,” he tells me.
“Of course we cater to the gay community,” Edmondson adds, “but it’s a restaurant for everybody.”
That’s the same mantra he uses to describe the new gay-friendly sports bar, Woody’s Classic Sports Pub, he’s opening this summer with his partner, Dr. Eric Christensen. “It’s not a gay sports bar,” he says. “It’s a sports bar for everyone.”
But, you know, primarily for gay sports fans.
By this time tomorrow, the sign at 3740 Broadway advertising the street-level bar as Vandals Punk Rock Club will be removed from the building. The new sign — still uncompleted — will be going up sometime in July and will introduce the space as Woody’s Classic Sports Pub.
Edmondson and Christensen have been working on the longtime lounge space (it was the Newsroom in the 1960s, later Kenny’s Newsroom and, more recently, the Black & Gold Tavern). They’ve hired former Vandals general manager Michelle Wyssman to be the general manager at Woody’s (she has been overseeing construction of the space) and a new chef who will, Edmondson says, “put a new spin on traditional bar fare.”
Edmondson says he’s hoping that the venue will be open by August. And it’s available for wedding receptions.
