This Week in Kansas City: two guys, a burger, and the shape of a good week

Welcome to This Week in KC, The Stare’s weekly recap of the stuff that actually makes this a city worth living in. Not the primary, not the World Cup, not whatever national thing is trending. Everybody already knows about those. This is the other list: the things that entered Kansas City’s field of view for the first time this week. A new burger window. A park a Boy Scout drew up decades ago. A neighbor who showed up.

Each section carries a counter: how many stories fell into that corner of local life this week, across 17 KC newsrooms. The bar shows how it stacks against the others; tap the number to see every story we counted. It’s not a ranking by volume. It’s a ranking by new to you.

The most Kansas City thing that happened this week: Disco Burger opened a real front door. The former pop-up, the cart that ran outside the Varsity Club in the River Market, now has a brick-and-mortar at 600 E 63rd St in Brookside, from owners Matt Chapman and Darren Carter. Online orders went live Thursday via Toast; it’s to-go only for now, Thursday through Sunday, 4–9pm, with dine-in, soft serve, steak frites, and a small bar promised as the buildout finishes. Burgers run $9 to $13, and the cart, for the record, continues. (Per the KC Star and The Pitch, July 23.) There’s the story of this city in one paragraph: somebody sells a good burger out of a cart until enough people show up that they need walls.

The openings keep coming. Circle Monday, July 28: KC Bier Co’s new Lenexa biergarten opens to the public: 30,000 square feet of Bavarian-style beer garden, first announced back in early 2025 and now, per the brewery’s own site, days away (the Waldo original at 310 W 79th St is unchanged; all the brewing stays home). City Barrel quietly has a second location, “Pizza + Patio” at 120 E Gregory Blvd on the Waldo/Brookside line, with its own menu separate from the East Crossroads flagship. AR’s Breakfast & Brunch now lists three rooms: the Overland Park flagship on Metcalf, a new Leawood spot on Ash Street, and Westport — after Olathe quietly came off the roster; the Leawood room looks like the successor, though AR’s hasn’t said so, so we’ll call it an observation, not a claim. Session Taco is down to a single KC-metro location, in the East Crossroads, noted plainly and warmly; rooms in this town empty out and fill back up all the time. Afterword Tavern & Shelves, the cocktail-and-books bar that lost its Crossroads lease when the building sold, is settled into its new Midtown home at 3105 Gillham Rd, roughly four times the space of the old room. A closing that turned into an upgrade.

Three finds from the fine print of KC’s own menus and websites this week, the kind of thing that never gets a press release:

Our verification desk noticed Tom’s Town’s corruption-era bottle names (Eli’s StrongArm Vodka, McElroy’s Corruption Gin) are gone from the official lineup. We chased it down: the trail leads back to a 2018 “branded house” redesign, and the story of why a beloved KC distillery named its gin after a crooked city manager in the first place, and why the founders’ own families were on the other side of the machine — turned into our first Stare original feature. Read it here.

The Phoenix, the downtown jazz and piano bar, now opens at noon on Saturdays , bar until 1:30am, kitchen until 10. Saturday afternoon jazz is now an option in this city, which feels like civilization advancing.

An evergreen “did you know,” confirmed on the bar’s own site: Kelly’s Westport Inn has no kitchen. The food window in the back is Guy’s Deli, an entirely independent business operating inside the bar. Two businesses, one room, decades of peace. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Here’s the thing about KC kitchens: they don’t just open, they branch. The Chingu lineage is the week’s best example: the Westport Korean restaurant closed in 2025, but the family it came from keeps growing: Sura Eats sauces, Chingu Soju, and Casita de lil Chingu, the Korean-Mexican residency on Southwest Boulevard. KCUR reports an Alma Mader x Chingu chimaek collaboration (Korean fried chicken and beer) expected on Southwest Boulevard this fall. One closed room, half a dozen new ideas. That’s not a loss; that’s a root system.

Look at who’s signing the newest leases. Two coffee shops opened weeks apart this summer, both by people who can’t rent a car without a surcharge: Press’d Cafe and Lounge in the River Market (Cristina and Matthew Marzolf, both 25, who also run Burrito Bros) and Artifact Coffee & Goods in the Garment District (Marlee Ogden and Zack Scott, both 23, with an all-plant-milk espresso program and a rotating local-artist wall, in the former Vested space). (Per the KC Star and The Pitch, June.) Twenty-three years old and running a room. We’ll be watching them for years.

One more for the deeper file: Local Liquid, the second act of Bier Station founder John Couture: lifelong KC, founded Bier Station in 2012, sold it to City Barrel in 2023, and in late 2024 launched an online marketplace and delivery service for KC-made beverages: craft beer, local-roaster coffee, kombucha, spirits, sodas, run out of a warehouse at 6500 Troost, with a nationally shipped KC-coffee subscription on top. A local business whose entire product is other local businesses. Very us.

The week’s best stories were the small ones. A family surprised a 105-year-old birthday lady with a motorcycle ride — “such a baddie,” per the relatives (KCTV5). A 17-year-old who spent her birthday in the hospital is now making sure other kids there don’t feel alone (KCTV5). Someone in a Spider-Man costume helped a person in a wheelchair cross the street, caught on camera, no explanation offered or needed (KCTV5). In the Missouri flash floods, two rescuers lost their boat and kept going anyway (KCUR), because of course they did.

Union Pacific’s iconic “Big Boy” steam engine rolled through town Tuesday, drawing the crowd it always does (KCTV5, FOX4’s look inside). KC CarePortal also quietly passed 500,000 children served nationwide, from right here (Metro Voice). Half a million kids. Quietly.

The quiet giant of the week’s coverage: more local stories touched parks, pools, trails, and green space than any other corner of city life. The best of them: a North Kansas City park opened decades after an Eagle Scout first drew up the plans (KSHB). One kid, one drawing, decades of patience, and now a park. That’s the most This-Week-in-KC story we’ve ever run.

Elsewhere in the green: Jackson County’s new sunflower habitat hit full bloom right on schedule for its grand opening (KCTV5). Roeland Park’s giant climbable bike, exactly what it sounds like, is finally open to climbers (JoCo Post). Theatre in the Park previewed the rest of its summer slate (KCTV5), JCPRD profiled the program where 120 young artists find their voice (JoCo Post), and Overland Park laid out what’s replacing the Bluejacket Pool under its new aquatics plan (JoCo Post), worth a read if your summers run through that water.

Circle your calendar

• Monday, July 28: KC Bier’s Lenexa biergarten opens.
• Late summer: Disco Burger phase two: dine-in, soft serve, steak frites, a small bar.
• Fall: the Alma Mader x Chingu chimaek collaboration lands on Southwest Boulevard, per KCUR.

Go out. Be a regular.

One consumer note from the week’s fine print: comparing local restaurants’ own ordering pages against the delivery apps, we found markups running around 30% across entire menus: same food, same kitchen, a third more money, most of it never reaching the restaurant. So here’s the order of operations, best to still-pretty-good:

Best: walk in. Restaurant margins in this town are razor-thin, a few points on a good month, and the difference between a place surviving and a place becoming a “remember when” is a neighborhood that actually shows up. Sit at the counter. Learn a name. Tip the person in front of you. A city full of people who go out and are decent to each other is worth more than any amount of logistics.

Still good: order from the restaurant’s own website. Most run their own online ordering now, and every dollar of that markup stays in the room instead of leaving town.

Better than nothing: the apps. An order is an order, and we’re not here to scold anybody’s Tuesday night. But know what the convenience costs, and know who it costs it to.

A public-service announcement about produce

Separately (and this is about grocery-store salad bags, not any restaurant), we have to talk about the lettuce, so let’s do it with dignity. Kansas City is in the grip of a cyclosporiasis outbreak tied to a round of retail lettuce recalls, with Johnson County seeing a sharp spike (FOX4; statewide numbers via the Kansas Reflector; the national picture via the Missouri Independent). The clinical term for the symptom is “explosive.” We’re a family publication, so we’ll just say a great many of our neighbors are having a deeply personal, deeply time-sensitive week, and the culprit appears to be salad, the one food we all agreed to eat because it was supposed to be responsible. Wash your produce, check your recalls, cook a vegetable like a patriot, and be kind to everyone right now. You genuinely do not know what they’re going through.

This Week in KC is The Stare’s weekly recap: the small, the local, and the lightly absurd. We point to the newsrooms and the businesses’ own pages; we don’t republish. Section counters are stories tracked across 17 KC newsrooms over the past seven days; local-business items were verified against official sources on July 24.