The Top Ten Cafes to write a Novel
| A table for writing at Brookside’s Aixois; it’s not a literary Mecca like La Coupole in Paris … yet |
Ernest Hemingway ate here.
In Kansas City, that is. Yes, he lived here and he liked the food.
A 1923 short story by Hemingway features a description of a meal of sea slugs he polished off in a Kansas City Chinese restaurant. There may be a culinary theme: In 1937, when that other great 20th-century novelist Sinclair Lewis was traveling through the Midwest on a lecture tour, he wrote to a female friend in New York about Kansas City. This town, he wrote, “is entirely composed of chop suey joints and the $500,000 homes of ex-oil millionaires who are now washing dishes in the chop suey joints and the very handsome stone monuments of lecturers who were shot by bored audiences.”
There’s no record that either of these two famous novelists actually sat down and wrote in these chop suey joints. But if a modern writer is so inclined, here are Jonathan Bender and my suggestions for places to write the Great American Novel:
10) Kin Lin Chinese Restaurant, 314 E. 51st Street. It’s a chop suey joint all right, but the food is cheap, so you can slowly sip on a bowl of hot-and-sour soup or nibble on plate of fried rice and begin work on an epic novel that makes War and Peace look as slight as Alligators All Around. As long as you’re eating, the staff is happy and you can sit until closing time.
9) Bobby Baker’s Lounge, 7418 Wornall Road. Cramped and dimly lit, this is a Waldo haunt with character. It’s one of the few spots in town that attracts all ages, which means that there will definitely be some life experience to mine.
8) Latteland, 7900 Stateline Road. Two-sided cubicles with bar tables make for nice writing caves. The Prairie Village and Plaza locations offer the right mix of caffeine and quiet.
7) Nine Muses Cafe, Kansas City Public Library, 14 West 10th Street. Tucked into a corner of the ground floor of the Central Library, this little venue (with food catered by the Hereford House) is surrounded by shelf after shelf of the world’s greatest literature. Inspiration is everywhere!
