Tea and Empathy

For some locals with fond memories of Emery Bird Thayer’s Tea Room, the 22-year-old EBT Restaurant is not their cup of tea. That goes especially for Kansas City’s best-known preservation activist, Jane Flynn, who has never set foot in the restaurant (see review). She still has a sour taste from her first preservation battle thirty years ago to save the old Emery Bird Thayer, which was razed to make room for a new downtown building that was supposed to be designed by noted architect I.M. Pei. The Pei building was obviously never built, and Flynn went on to become a fierce defender of landmark buildings in a town that prefers to knock ’em down.

A decade after crews demolished the original EBT, the old Macy’s store went down as well. It also had a legendary tea room.

“It was fabulous,” recalls Judy Lanes, who once worked at the store. “And there was a smaller, smokier dining room just for men. A beautiful room with cherry woodwork. I always wanted to crash it. Oh, and don’t forget the restaurant at Stix, Baer & Fuller at Ward Parkway. It was a gorgeous dining room, and the food was great.”

Stix, Baer & Fuller was replaced in the 1980s by Dillard’s, which quickly eliminated the restaurant. These days, it’s hard to imagine that it used to be rare when a department store didn’t have some kind of dining room. Today only Nordstrom’s at Oak Park Mall has a place to eat, one that’s undergone a major change since it began serving three meals a day in 1998.

When the attractively designed Café Nordstrom had its grand opening, the dining room was split in half, with full sit-down service on one side and cafeteria-style express dining on the other.

“The menu and the hours were the same,” says the restaurant’s manager, Michael Leslie, “but we discovered that more customers were using the express side of the dining room, so after a year, we stopped offering full-service dining.”

Now all customers pick up their trays and go through the self-service line, where lanky young men in starched white shirts prepare fresh salads and sandwiches and take orders for the café’s four pizzas or three pasta choices. Desserts, breads and rolls are still baked in the restaurant’s kitchen, and everything is served on attractive china with heavy flatware. As in old department-store days, prices are reasonable: $7.25 for a giant grilled-chicken Caesar salad, $7.95 for a good-sized plate of ravioli.

“We’re still busier at lunch than we are for dinner,” Leslie says. “I don’t think most Missouri residents even know that we’re here.”

But if they want the tradition of finding salads, sandals and Jil Sander body gel under one roof to continue, Missouri diners might want to check out Café Nordstrom. Good ideas don’t last forever.