Kansas City Restaurant Week is underway and continues through January 19. This year marks a record: 245 restaurants are participating in the 10-day dining event, which provides an opportunity to try new restaurants and revisit familiar ones. 

Special Collections Manager Jeremy Drouin says Kansas City’s hospitality and hotel and restaurant industry dates to “Westport being an outfitter for Western travelers” along the Santa Fe Trail. 

But running a restaurant is difficult business – even more so today with rising food and labor costs and staffing shortages. The average restaurant only stays open for about eight to 10 years.

The Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections captures a snapshot of Kansas City’s restaurant past, including menus from the S. Stephen Lispi Collection. There are storied favorites, such as The Golden Ox (reopened in 2018 with new owners), Putsch’s, and Waid’s.  

“People are nostalgic for those kinds of old menus, and more so for the old restaurants they used to frequent,” says Drouin. “And then, you know, they're trying to remember, like, what was that dish that they always served?” 

This fall, a Missouri family, who frequented restaurants during their travels, donated their collection of restaurant menus, past and present, to the Library.  

“The donor contacted us,” says Special Collections Senior Librarian and Archivist Kara Flinn, “and let us know that she had this large menu collection that her family, primarily her mother and father, had collected since the 1970s as they traveled around the world.” 

So Flinn stopped by, packaged up the collection, and transported more than 20 boxes to the Library.  

About a third of this new collection focuses on Kansas and Missouri restaurants, including casual dining, such as Red Robin, steakhouses like Plaza III, and barbecue restaurants, such as Hayward’s Pit Bar B Que and Fiorella’s Kansas City.  

“We are currently working on an inventory of the Kansas City area menus,” says Flinn. “So, the collection can be accessed on a very limited basis, meaning if someone is looking for something specific then we can look through what we have to see if we have a match.”  

The menus range from sheets of paper and laminated plastic to leather-bound folders. Not all list a location, but the family often recorded where they picked them up and when they visited.  

“The donor mentioned that her parents would ask for a menu, an old menu that they might be ready to throw away or something,” says Flinn. “And a lot of the time the restaurants would happily give them one.”