Spectators replaces all of the restaurants at the Sheraton Crown Center
For more than three decades, the hotel formerly known as the Hyatt Regency Kansas City had three popular dining rooms for its hotel guests and local patrons: a classy, revolving venue called Skies; the stylish Peppercorn Duck Club; and the mezzanine-level Terrace restaurant (which had, in the early 1980s, the most popular Sunday brunch in the metro). When the Hyatt Regency was revamped as a Sheraton for Starwood Hotels and Resorts in 2011, the two expensive restaurant properties – the snazzy Skies and the glitzy Peppercorn Duck Club – were unceremoniously shut down. Their day had come and gone.
The Terrace operated as the only dining room on the hotel property until the construction was completed earlier this year on Spectators, a casual dining venue that incorporates the former Peppercorn Duck Club dining room and the former J. Patrick’s Lounge. Both venues were gutted to create Spectators, which serves breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The Terrace is now closed to the general public (it’s rented as a space for wedding receptions and special events) and the top-floor restaurant, Skies, which no longer slowly spins around, is used exclusively as a hospitality room for hotel guests enrolled in the Starwood Preferred Guest program.
“The days of hotels having multiple restaurants in the property are mostly over,” says Brent Grider, complex director of restaurants and bars for the Crown Center Starwood hotels – his duties also include overseeing the Milano Italian restaurant and the Crayola Cafe in the Crown Center complex; the latter two restaurants were formerly managed by a division of Hallmark called Culinary Concepts.
Grider’s theory is true: The InterContinental Hotel Kansas City on the Country Club Plaza (formerly the Alameda Hotel and the Ritz-Carlton) now has one dining room instead of two; that’s also true of the Downtown Marriott. The historic Hotel Muehlebach, now merely an addition to the Marriott, once had several dining areas – the Terrace Grill, Le Bistro, and Cafe Picardy among them – and now has none. Until the 1960s, the hotels in any town typically had the nicest dining rooms. By the end of the 20th century, hotel dining rooms were often the worst places to eat.
“One of my biggest challenges,” says Grider, “is keeping up with the many changes in hotel dining. Things are changing rapidly, including the kind of customers who dine at our properties, the environment, the style of food we serve. Hotel dining is an important amenity for our guests, but in today’s competitive restaurant climate, it has to be more than that.”
Spectator’s menu was created by the hotel’s French-born executive chef Franck Marciniak, who replaced the lunch and dinner menus with a single all-day menu that offers both traditional hotel restaurant favorites (salads, hamburgers, flatbread pizzas) and trendier choices like a charcuterie plate, a pork belly confit with caramelized apples, a lamb burger with tzatziki sauce, and slow-cooked short ribs. The entree prices range from $16 for fish and chips to $29 for a 14-ounce charbroiled rib-eye smothered in bearnaise sauce.
Spectators is open seven days a week and serves breakfast from 6:30 to 11 a.m., lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. The bar side of the venue has an abbreviated menu that it serves until midnight.
