Streetside: Hi-Dive makes a well-timed splash in 39th Street West

The 39th Street West neighborhood is home to a number of city-famous establishments — Jazz, Donna’s Dress Shop, d’Bronx, Room 39 — but is not exactly an entertainment district. At least, not in the way Westport, the Plaza and the Power & Light are. It’s a great area for happy hour, dinner and maybe a drink after dinner, but by about 1:30 a.m., the streets are sleepy and quiet. Nobody in the neighborhood has a 3 a.m. liquor license. (That said, D.B. Cooper’s does open back up at 6 a.m. for marathon partiers seeking the drinking-binge equivalent of eating six saltine crackers in a minute.)

That is part of 39th Street West’s charm.The peaceful liberal residents who make up the neighborhood get the food, culture and commerce without having to deal with bar fights and dubstep. And yet, you wonder how long it will last, given the boom happening down the block at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

The last year has seen a Holiday Inn Express constructed at a location — 39th Street and Rainbow — that would have been laughable a mere five years ago. On the ground floor of the structure, a new Five Guys is slinging up burgers and free peanuts, and phase two of the project calls for more retail and the construction of more medical facilities. At 39th Street and State Line, a site once occupied by a dinky Qdoba is being transformed into a mixed-use space with 3,900 square feet of retail and 70 luxury residential units.

Most of the bars on 39th Street West give the impression that they have existed since the Eisenhower presidency. That, too, is charming, but also suggests opportunity for new business. Until last summer, Grant Naugle had been scouting out locations for a new bar all over the Kansas City area. His first venture, the sports-y Tower Tavern (which he opened with Damian King), has been a success on Martini Corner, and he has wanted to try out a new concept somewhere else. Naugle looked at spaces out south, in Waldo and in Brookside, but nothing panned out. Then he got wind that the Minsky’s Pizza at 1411 West 39th Street was finally closing after many years of serving terrible food. (The location was a rogue Minsky’s operation, legally allowed to use the name of the beloved local chain but no longer under its control.)

“It was a shithole in there, but I loved the location,” Naugle says. “We felt like we could do what we wanted to do and have it fit in with everything we loved about the 39th Street neighborhood.”

He and his business partner, Bill Howgill, closed the deal, and in late February Hi-Dive Lounge opened for business. The concept is in the name.

“We wanted to do a high-class bar that felt a little like a dive,” Naugle says. “A cool neighborhood place that could bridge the gap between nice restaurants like Room 39 and a dive like Gilhouly’s. We didn’t see anything else on 39th Street that was in that middle-ground area.”

They’ve pretty much succeeded. Hi-Dive is mellow, unpretentious, clean and, most important, dark enough. You can watch a Royals game on a flat-screen TV, but you can also order yard beers that come tumbling out of a vending machine behind the bar. (Alas, only the bartenders are allowed to use it.) There are places to hide, too: outside on the small smoking patio, inside at a glassed-in booth, in the back at a high table. It’s not cheap, exactly, but if you order smart, you can drink cheap enough. And come to think of it, Gilhouly’s charged me $3.50 for a Budweiser last time I was in there — reasonable, I guess, but not a dive-bar price, either.

The food is also a high-low balance. Naugle brought in Tim Daggit, who designed the original menu at Tower Tavern and had been working as a sous chef at Tannin, to run the kitchen. He has combined some comfort-food basics — meatloaf, pork chops, mashed potatoes — with items like the short-rib tacos, a customer favorite. “We gave him free rein,” Naugle says. “He’s making everything in-house; he switches up the menu; he does a daily pasta special for lunch; he makes his own soups, which are delicious. We’re letting Tim have the run of the place, basically.”

Naugle says the response from the neighborhood has been positive. (The three nights I popped in, business was between steady and bustling, a healthy mix of tattoos and neckties.) “We’ve had a lot of people come in and say that it’s exactly what 39th Street needed, which is really what we were hoping for,” he says. “That’s going to be our bread and butter, getting neighborhood people into it. And, you know, it won’t be for everybody. I saw a guy posted something on Yelp ripping into us for calling ourselves a dive. It’s like, ‘Of course we’re not a dive: We just opened.’ I’m sure Gilhouly’s wasn’t a dive when it opened 85 years ago or whatever. You can’t just create a dive bar.”