Chuck Eats KC - December 27, 2022
Looking back at 2022. Review of True Food Kitchen. Restaurant closings and openings.
Year in Review
It may be a bit obvious to say that 2022 was a year of transition for so many things, including the Kansas City food scene. Coming on the heels of two years of once-in-a-lifetime societal changes, 2022 was a year of positive and negative changes for the local food scene.
Kansas City, like most cities and communities around the world, saw people dining at restaurants again and otherwise returning to daily rituals that we took for granted before 2020. Kansas City restaurants and diners had to deal with inflated food prices, increased transportation costs, pandemic precautions, and many other financial factors. While the pandemic is not over, most people are eating out again and dining inside restaurants. Inflation drove up most food prices during the year, but recently food prices are roughly returning to typical levels. Transportation prices spiked and while they have returned to low levels for consumers, diesel prices are still high and are producing some friction for falling food, equipment and supply prices.
Did Kansas City see more or less restaurant closings and openings than the previous two years? Did the pandemic cause lots of restaurants to close? The short answer is “no,” at least from what I’ve discovered through my experience creating a restaurant directory this past summer. I created a comprehensive restaurant directory and neighborhood guides for the Chuck Eats KC website, with pages for local cities, business districts, and neighborhood restaurant rows. I found several listings of restaurants that had been published in 2018 and 2019 and used these as a basis for my updated guides. I went through the initial list, verifying that each restaurants was open or closed, and then added new restaurants and ones that hadn’t been listed in my source lists.
It was surprising to me to discover that few restaurants had closed during 2020, 2021, and early 2022. It looks like the closing rate was much lower than the average turnover of restaurants. Another factor in the closure rate may be that some new restaurant concepts didn’t open during these years. Several proposed projects were abandoned or changed.
Were there any patterns to the type of restaurant that closed in the past couple of years? From what I’ve noticed in the process of creating and updating a list of local restaurants, it seems that corporate restaurants closed more and corporate restaurants in dense restaurant districts like the Country Club Plaza and Zona Rosa closed more in 2020 and 2021 than mom-and-pop restaurants.
It feels like the pace of restaurant closings has picked up in the second half of 2022. The causes seem to vary. It’s not just a case of restaurant owners holding on for several pandemic years and then throwing in the towel. There has been a wave of retirements. Several restaurant groups have shut down locations. There are the usual amount of closing due to unspecified financial, family and personal reasons. We will miss many of those closing, but this also means new restaurants to try in 2023.
Openings, Closings, Good Byes and Coming Soon
I was hoping to review Martin City Coffee this month or next, but they are closing. Owners cite financial and personal reasons. The restaurant has been open for four years. Dos De Oros is opening a taqueria in the space.
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