Prospect Avenue evolves into a dining destination

It’s easy to find lots of good things to eat on Prospect Avenue. Last week’s Pitch cover story, “Comeback Street,” detailed the restaurant resurgence going on along the historic East Side thoroughfare, which was the racial dividing line in Kansas City for decades, until the late 1960s. A new generation of restaurateurs has taken over — even on the most forlorn stretches of the avenue — and created one of the most vibrant dining environments this street has seen in years.

There is a caveat: Because of the avenue’s slow decline (precipitated, many believe, by the long construction of midtown freeway Bruce R. Watkins Drive, which razed and disrupted properties east and west of Prospect), it’s still not easy to find a good cup of coffee.

Starbucks and Kaldi’s haven’t landed on Prospect. If you want to find anything resembling a cappuccino, you’ll have to use the self-service machine at the Pick ’n Save Market at the corner of 58th Street and Prospect. There you’ll find the sweet, foamy brew, sold by many big-name convenience stores, that has more in common with hot chocolate than it does with coffee. But the Pick ’n Save — which sells cigarettes, prepaid phones, and a couple of green peppers that have seen better days — is as close to an upscale coffeehouse as you’ll find on this street, even if you have to pay a cashier who sits behind a thick pane of bulletproof glass.

On Prospect, most of the restaurants are strictly takeout venues with, typically, one table and a few chairs in awkwardly small “dining rooms.” There are exceptions to the rule — Mo’s Italian Spot and Chicken Macaroni & Cheese, both of which have plenty of comfortable seating — but most of the newer Prospect restaurants are essentially waiting rooms.

That includes the eight-month-old E&J’s Soul Food and More, at 5311 Prospect, which moved into the location formerly occupied by Chicken Macaroni & Cheese after that restaurant’s owners, Dyamund Shields Sr. and Dyamund Shields Jr., created a much more elaborate sit-down dining spot at 7025 Prospect.

Past a thick steel door is the E&J’s unglamorous waiting room. During daylight hours, soap operas play on a monitor mounted near the counter, where manager Michelle Walker barks orders to the kitchen crew in the back for carryout pork-chop sandwiches, fried-chicken dinners, or biscuits and gravy. (Breakfast is served all day at E&J’s.)

The owners, Earl Morgan and Jamesetta Rhodes, wanted to start with a smaller venue for their first restaurant, which is why the Prospect location seemed ideal.

“We thought the neighborhood needed us there — and they do,” Rhodes says. “And maybe we should have opened in a bigger place. We get calls every day, asking if we have sit-down dining, which so few restaurants on Prospect offer. And maybe we will have that, eventually.”

Rhodes says she would like to believe that there’s a shift in perception about Prospect Avenue with the newer restaurants opening. But, she admits, she admits, “I still have friends and relatives who just don’t want to come to Prospect.”

The exterior appearances of some restaurants on Prospect can be more than unfriendly; they’re almost foreboding. The glass-sheathed structure that houses the Jamdown Kitchen Jamaican Restaurant, at 6836 Prospect, is armored with black steel bars. The door is unlocked during business hours, and the lobby of the space is big enough for only one table with three chairs and a granite counter with two stools.

The menu is handwritten on a board above the entrance to the kitchen. An employee with shoulder-length dreads waits patiently for me to decide on curry chicken, brown stew or curried goat.

Most of Jamdown Kitchen’s patrons take their food to go, but I sat at the counter and stuffed myself with a heap of fragrant curried chicken and washed it down with a bottle of Grace pineapple-ginger drink (made in Jamaica and really gingery) while watching reggae-music videos playing on a TV screen. I also attempted to memorize the national anthem of Jamaica. The words are printed on a banner near the kitchen pass-through window, where white Styrofoam boxes appear every so often filled with fat piles of fried rice and beans, spicy jerk dishes or a meaty, slow-braised oxtail.

Most of the new restaurants opening on Prospect are choosing the area south of 49th Street. But one business owner at 4424 Prospect has been holding his own in the same location for more than four decades.

Johnny Pryor has been running Johnny’s Donuts and Hamburgers from an unassuming buff-brick building since 1981. (Pryor worked in the combination pastry-and-sandwich shop owned by Louis Walker for 12 years before buying the place.) The fresh doughnuts at Johnny’s are featherlight and delicious.

“We’ve always sold burgers, cheeseburgers, doughnuts and filled pastries here,” Pryor says. “But over the years, I’ve added a lot more to the menu, like pork chops, chicken wings and fried mushrooms.”

The Prospect Avenue neighborhood has been good to him, Pryor says.

“I have a lot of regular customers who come in every day,” he says. “It’s a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of ups and downs, but I say, ‘You’ve just got to take one day from the next and be your best.’”