Prairie Village Waid’s closes suddenly, but predictably
A business card is still taped to the locked front door of the Waid’s restaurant in the Prairie Village Shopping Center. Bev left it for her friends Ev and Lou, telling them to meet her at First Watch in Corinth. Bev, like many other diners, was taken off-guard by the Sunday-night closing of the Waid’s in Prairie Village.
All good things must come to an end … and in the case of the venerable Waid’s restaurant at 6920 Mission, it ended long before the restaurant finally – and quickly – closed last night. The restaurant’s cashier got a late-night phone call on Sunday telling her not to report for work on Monday but to go to the last remaining Waid’s in the metro at 1130 West 103rd Street.
“We knew it was coming,” she told me on her way out for a smoke break this afternoon. “We just didn’t know when. The restaurant had been on a month-to-month lease with the landlord for a long time.”
Once a popular neighborhood-diner concept, dating back to 1953, there had been at least five area Waid’s restaurants in the 1980s, including two venues in Johnson County (the one at 95th Street and Mission was the unofficial office for Tom Leathers, the iconoclastic publisher of the Squire weekly newspaper) and a Kansas City, Kansas, location at 3063 Southwest Boulevard. The restaurants were best-known for their hearty breakfasts, home-style dinners and modest prices. The remaining Watts Mill Waid’s survived a move, over a decade earlier, from 103rd Street and Wornall.
