Vintage Veg

Kansas City’s reputation as a steak-and-potatoes town dates back to 1871, when the stockyards were built in the West Bottoms to handle all the cattle being shipped east. The stockyards were still thriving in 1906, when most Kansas City restaurant menus offered at least one steak.

But not all of them. In August of that year, the city’s first all-vegetarian restaurant, the Unity Inn, opened in an old frame house at 913 Tracy. The inn, which served three daily meals with no meat, was just north of the original Unity headquarters; Unity co-founders Charles and Myrtle Fillmore preferred the meatless lifestyle.

The menu on August 22, 1906, included French peas with carrots, rice balls, lima beans and rolls. More than 140 people dined in the restaurant that day and paid whatever they wanted.

It was instantly successful — so popular, in fact, that the restaurant’s freewill-offering concept was abandoned before the Unity Inn moved out of the little house in 1920 and into a beautiful new cafeteria building at the corner of Ninth Street and Tracy. Before World War II, the Unity Inn was one of the largest vegetarian venues in the United States, sometimes serving as many as 10,000 meals a week.

When Unity moved its headquarters to the newly built Unity Village, near Lee’s Summit, in 1949, the Unity Inn moved, too. “By the early 1960s, the inn stopped being all-vegetarian,” Tom Taylor, Unity’s manager of public relations, says. Today, 100 years after serving that first meat-free meal, the Unity Inn still offers one vegetarian entrée on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays — lunch only, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. — in the cafeteria at Unity Village. The faux meatloaf, the Unity Nutloaf, is frequently a special, just as it was in 1906.

There’s no freewill offering, of course, but the prices are still cheap: The daily special typically costs about $6.25, including a roll and two side dishes. For those who don’t want nutloaf or vegetable quiche, the menu offers real meatloaf and fried chicken. And, just as in 1906, there’s homemade dessert, too.