Stroud's KC closing?

from Chowhound's midwest board:

Subject: KC - Stroud's (South) Moving?!?!?!?
From: lboecker@kc.rr.com (Mushroom)
Posted: September 09, 2005 at 13:14:59

Message:
Todays KC Star (business section)is reporting that Stroud's (south) must move to make room for expansions of the Troost bridge & 85th St. Per the Star: "The city and Stroud's owner Mike Donegan have agreed to a financial settelement for the property". I'm very depressed.

TJ, there's another north of the river in an historic house, but the roadhouse feel of the original will be hard to duplicate. Progress, bah humbug!

Fortunately, "move" doesn't necessarily mean "close." I had the pleasure of patronizing Stroud's and having some of their great fried chicken a couple of years ago when I went to KC for my job. Hopefully, they will simply relocate. Here's the KC Star article:

City says Stroud’s must make way for road widening

By JOYCE SMITH

The Kansas City Star


If you have a vacant old roadhouse under a bridge, call Stroud’s.

For decades, Stroud’s restaurant has been famous for its crispy fried chicken — and for its buckled building in the shadows of a Troost Avenue bridge. But while Stroud’s will continue to operate at 1015 E. 85th St. for the next few months, it must find a new home by the end of the year.

The city wants to replace the bridge and widen Troost at 85th Street. Also, 85th Street would be widened to four lanes from Holmes Road to Tracy Avenue.

“Stroud’s just happens to fall in a bad location,” said Jennifer Berry, project coordinator for Jackson County Public Works, which is managing the project for the city. “To widen the road, it takes half of their building.”

The city and Stroud’s owner Mike Donegan have agreed to a financial settlement for the property.

“I’m not crazy about it, but I don’t have a choice, and I wasn’t raised to be a whiner so I’m not going to do it,” Donegan said. “I’d like to move it, but I don’t know if that’s feasible.”

Donegan is decidedly against strip centers and longs for another old roadhouse under a viaduct.

Even founder Helen Stroud called Stroud’s a “shack” when she opened her barbecue restaurant on the southwest corner of 85th and Holmes Road in 1933. The location, on the outskirts of the city, sold ribs for 15 cents, sardines for a dime and draft beer for a nickel. But one Fourth of July, the cook bought some fryers — three for a dollar.

Chicken sold out that night and has been on the menu since, with every piece pan-fried to order and served directly from old iron skillets.

By 1972 Stroud was tired of the long hours and six-day weeks, so she sold the operation. A few years later, Donegan and a partner bought the restaurant and have since expanded three times. Donegan, who later bought out his partner, also owns Stroud’s North at 5410 N.E. Oak Ridge Drive.

The 2005 edition of Zagat Survey’s America’s Top Restaurants noted Stroud’s “legendary fried chicken” and warped yet homey setting, which was also called a “wonderful dump.” Martha Stewart Living magazine listed it as a “must-try road-trip destination” in the November 2002 issue. Stroud’s also won a 1998 James Beard Award for regional classic cuisine.

Parking is at such a premium that customers often walk along the edge of bustling two-lane 85th Street to reach the front door. On weekends, they pack the bar as they wait up to two hours for crispy fried chicken, cream pan gravy and cinnamon rolls, served family style.

Stroud’s — with a slogan of “We choke our own chickens” — serves nearly 12,000 pounds of chicken a week.

“Going to Stroud’s and not-so-daintily ravaging a fried chicken is an exercise in tradition. Where will we waddle to now?” said longtime customer Pat O’Neill of Kansas City.

Paul Sepe, an out-of-town fan, agreed.

“It’s modest and simple, but all the cars parked in front and down the street and under the viaduct tell you it’s someplace special,” said Sepe, who often makes road trips from his New Hampshire home to eat at Stroud’s and other favorites.

“I love the crooked windows and the wooden floors polished from decades of use — and maybe ambient grease. It (a move) will be OK as long as they bring their skillets and grease, but it won’t be quite the same.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To reach Joyce Smith, retail and small-business reporter, call (816) 234-4692 or send e-mail to jsmith@kcstar.com.

The KC restaurant workers rumour mill says the Stroud's people are looking for an older free standing building, not something in a strip mall. That may be a challenge, but not impossible. It sure won't be the same. The Stroud's north of the river (Stroud's Oak Ridge Manor) isn't even close in ambiance, although the food is good. They do have a slightly more upscale menu. As long as the new one continues to choke their own chickens, it will be good. I just can't believe it will close and not re-open somewhere. There will be big protest here if that happens.

I went to Stroud's on a visit to my brother when he was living in KC. It was a dark & stormy night chain lightening & tornado warnings. We had an hour wait for a table, standing crammed into the area around the bar. It was great! I bought a T shirt with their slogan (still have it) It was some of the best chicken I've had & then there's the cinnamon rolls The best part was the old roadhouse feel, old tables with oilcloths. I hope they can keep the feel.

This news is regretful.

Got the news earlier today from a KC buddy of mine. I'd call it potentially tragic. Even if they relocate and maintain the quality of the food, the total experience of eating in that beautiful ramshackle old building will never be duplicated. The north side location serves good food but it just isn't the same. We ate there once years ago and haven't been back since. The 75th street location, on the other hand, is an annual tradition (sometimes twice a year if we get down that way). In fact, I'll be in town next week for the American Royal and my buddy and I have already made plans to meet there for dinner.

quote:

Originally posted by BuddyRoadhouse

Got the news earlier today from a KC buddy of mine. I'd call it potentially tragic. Even if they relocate and maintain the quality of The 75th street location, on the other hand, is an annual tradition (sometimes twice a year if we get down that way). In fact, I'll be in town next week for the American Royal and my buddy and I have already made plans to meet there for dinner.

You'll need to go 10 blocks south to 85th Street to Strouds.
Enjoy it this one last time! Get the gizzards and livers for me.

quote:

Originally posted by zataar

quote:

Originally posted by BuddyRoadhouse

Got the news earlier today from a KC buddy of mine. I'd call it potentially tragic. Even if they relocate and maintain the quality of The 75th street location, on the other hand, is an annual tradition (sometimes twice a year if we get down that way). In fact, I'll be in town next week for the American Royal and my buddy and I have already made plans to meet there for dinner.

You'll need to go 10 blocks south to 85th Street to Strouds.
Enjoy it this one last time! Get the gizzards and livers for me.

You are so right! I've been going to Stroud's for twenty six years, and everytime we go I still have to ask my KC native wife, "Are they on 75th or 85th?" Mrs. Roadhouse was not available for directions when I made the last post.

You are so right! I've been going to Stroud's for twenty six years, and everytime we go I still have to ask my KC native wife, "Are they on 75th or 85th?" Mrs. Roadhouse was not available for directions when I made the last post.


Everyone here is pretty sad by the prospect of Stroud's South no longer existing, but it's looking that way.
It should be a good weekend for the Royal, BuddyRoadhouse. Lot's of music and for the first time in forever, an area where people can purchase bbq and eat!

Actually, last year was the first annual "Taste of The Royal". It was badly promoted and mishandled in terms of the tokens needed to purchase 'Que from the contestants. After talking with other committee members, I'm hopeful that we've learned form our mistakes and will have a successful second chance. If you're coming to the Royal, be sure to stop in at the Barbecue Sauce Store and say hello. It should be fairly obvious who I am. By the way, the Sauce Store has moved from its long time location behind the Governor's building to the front, main entrance alongside the "Taste of The Royal" participants.

quote:

Originally posted by BuddyRoadhouse

Actually, last year was the first annual "Taste of The Royal". It was badly promoted and mishandled in terms of the tokens needed to purchase 'Que from the contestants. After talking with other committee members, I'm hopeful that we've learned form our mistakes and will have a successful second chance. If you're coming to the Royal, be sure to stop in at the Barbecue Sauce Store and say hello. It should be fairly obvious who I am. By the way, the Sauce Store has moved from its long time location behind the Governor's building to the front, main entrance alongside the "Taste of The Royal" participants.

The American Royal Parade this past Saturday was a rousing success. I understood from the press releases that the Taste of The Royal wasn't necessarily only contestants, but restaurants as well. And that tokens weren't part of it this year. Is that accurate, or just another local news blurb? The Sauce store is what everyone is talking about. It does sound fun.

Gotta be honest-I'm not sure if tokens will be used or cash. Although I'm on the committee, I'm in Chicago and don't get totally involved until the actual weekend of the Royal.

Do stop by the Sauce Store and say hello! In years past we've had literally hundreds of different sauces from all over the country, all donated by the manufacturers with all proceeds going to local charities.

Just got back from a pilgrimage to Strouds before closing. 3 days in the car, 1 in KC and 3 days back ~ worth every minute of drive time. Everything was exactly as it has ever been in my many, many visits as a resident and visitor. Good to hear they have found a new location, an old fire house at (I think) 95th & Nall. It will be good but with all those missing memories, not the same. An excellent alternative to being gone though! It makes me happy that those fabulous chicken livers, thick as paste gravy and grade school green beans will still be dished up to the lucky diners. We also hit Fiorella's and Oklahoma Joe's. Kansas City is one great eating city!

Chilton, any other info on the new location? I'd like to check it out when we're down there for Christmas to see the wife's family. We're hoping to get one last meal at the original location. BTW, three days in the car?!? Each way??? Where were you coming from? Glad the trip was worthwhile. Next time your in town, stop in on LC's or RJ's for some good 'Que.

quote:

Originally posted by bill voss

TJ, there's another north of the river in an historic house, but the roadhouse feel of the original will be hard to duplicate. Progress, bah humbug!

There are acutally 3 Strouds right now... The Original, AKA Strouds South, which has been there since the 1930s, Strouds North, and one in Wichita.

The Original is the best! Strouds North is good, but not on par with The Original. And when I was in Wichita on business, when I found out about it, I got all excited, but the food was nowhere near as good as even Strouds North. I was quite disappointed.

I hope that they relocate, but I don't think they are...

Mark

Another icon gone. Sigh!

quote:

Originally posted by BuddyRoadhouse

Chilton, any other info on the new location? I'd like to check it out when we're down there for Christmas to see the wife's family. We're hoping to get one last meal at the original location. BTW, three days in the car?!? Each way??? Where were you coming from? Glad the trip was worthwhile. Next time your in town, stop in on LC's or RJ's for some good 'Que.

The location on 85th doesn't close until Jan. 1 so you are in luck. The server told us about the new location so anyone you ask at Strouds should know exactly where and when the new one will open. We came from Alameda, CA, in the Bay Area. The trip was home to Elko, Nevada, Elko to Frisco, Co., Frisco to KC. Left KC to Cheyenne, WY. back to Elko and home. Took a different route home because of all the highway patrol in Kansas. Still got a ticket in Colorado though.

Good road food story about a not so happy happening
---------
He really goes the distance to savor Stroud’s

By STEVE PAUL

The Kansas City Star

By the time Paul Sepe arrives in Kansas City later this week, the odometer on his 1985 Volkswagen GTI will read somewhere around 910,000 miles.

Original engine. Worn, bachelor interior. Sepe is nothing if not passionate about driving.

And one more thing: He’s passionate about food.

He knows what he likes.

When he learned that on New Year’s Eve, Stroud’s would end its seven-decade run in its original 85th Street roadhouse, he had no doubt where he’d spend that festive night.

They don’t make chicken like that where Sepe lives in northern New Hampshire.

“They don’t make chicken like that anywhere else,” Sepe asserts.

So he’s making one more journey to his favorite restaurant in the world. Fifteen hundred miles one way for a plate or two of pan-fried chicken.

This will be his second trip to Kansas City and Stroud’s this year.

You might say Sepe, 42, has a driving passion for this city and one of its best-known eateries, which is being forced to relocate by a street-and-bridge project.

Although he says he doesn’t keep count, he figures he has dropped in as many as 80 times in the last dozen years.

Sepe (pronounced SEE’-pee) is a self-employed software engineer who writes custom corporate databases. Whenever he crisscrosses the continent for business or pleasure, he’ll stop here for chicken, plus barbecue and a handful of other attractions that have turned him into an unlikely ambassador for Kansas City’s quiet charms.

“Of all the cities in the U.S.,” he said, “Kansas City is one of my favorites.”

Kansas City seems to be on Sepe’s way to almost anywhere.

To Mexico. The West Coast.

He’ll drive hundreds of miles out of his way to get here.

From Lancaster, N.H., to Seattle? Done it.

On the way home from Winnipeg, Manitoba? Why not?

On a monthlong, 16,000-mile trip across Canada, up through Alaska, to the Arctic and back, Sepe headed home from Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of Stroud’s.

For a while Sepe made monthly business trips to Colorado. He stopped at Stroud’s every time.

Family and friends have sometimes joined him here for meals, coming in from Chicago or either coast. A few think him a bit nutty about the heartland. But they’ve also been convinced.

When Sepe first told his friend Yoshi Baba about the chicken he’d discovered in Kansas City, the Japanese immigrant didn’t understand why he’d travel so far for something like KFC.

“I used to think he was an idiot,” says Baba, a software engineer in Boston. “But now I seem to be a similar type person.”

Baba once rearranged a flight from Japan to Boston so he could deplane in Kansas City. Sepe, driving home from a vacation in Mexico, picked him up at the airport.

Where for dinner?

What do you think?

“I was amazed,” Baba says of that first meal at Stroud’s. “It wasn’t KFC.”

Baba has returned to Stroud’s a few times himself, most recently a year ago on a driving vacation with his pregnant wife and 9-year-old daughter. His wife prefers barbecue, he says, but he’s committed to Stroud’s.

Sepe’s passion for Stroud’s began in 1993, sparked by the noted road-food writers Jane and Michael Stern. (“Stroud’s makes the most delicious fried chicken in America,” they still note on their roadfood.net Web site.) After living in Germany a couple of years and driving all over Europe, Sepe realized he’d never seen much of North America. He began traveling extensively to make up for that.

It was on one of those trips that he stopped at Stroud’s Northland location. He had work to keep him busy during the two-hour wait, then bellied up to a dream.

“I couldn’t believe it was chicken,” he says. “I thought maybe it had to have been genetically altered.”

Not so far as anyone knows. It’s just a secret recipe and cooking process.

“He’s about the most unique customer we have,” says Stroud’s owner Mike Donegan. “I travel vicariously through him.”

While in Kansas City, Sepe also has worked up a liking for barbecue from Arthur Bryant’s and Snead’s in Belton. One night last July he was introduced to Oklahoma Joe’s in Kansas City, Kan., and after downing a plate of smoked chicken and fries, he went back for seconds — a half-slab of ribs.

The next two nights he had dinner at Stroud’s. His usual — the three-breast plate with cottage fries and all the rest.

Then he was off for an all-night drive back East. For dinner the next day, he met a friend at De Lorenzo’s in Trenton, N.J., his favorite place for pizza.

Sepe has managed to feed his passion without showing it. He’s a trim 6-footer. It would be a lot tougher if he lived here, he says. But he does know his limits. There’s no way he could eat at Stroud’s twice in one day.

As for traveling, it’s not so much that Sepe doesn’t like to fly. He just likes to drive and to see the country and culture beyond New England.

“I think Paul’s passion for Stroud’s is linked to his passion for traveling,” says his sister, Nancy Sepe. “And not being limited by distance.

“I don’t think those words have ever been uttered by Paul: It’s too far. If there were a restaurant on Saturn, I think Paul would go there. A good restaurant, of course.”

Nancy Sepe says her brother likes to push himself in ways other people wouldn’t even think of doing. A few times, returning to college at Carnegie-Mellon University after a spring or summer break, Paul rode his bicycle to Pittsburgh. From their home in Connecticut. Four hundred and fifty miles away.

So now that Sepe and his VW are nearing 1 million miles on the road, his sister says, it seems like he’s on a not-so-surprising mission.

Will the GTI make it to 1 million miles? Will the folks at Volkswagen notice? When the engine turned over 400,000 miles, Sepe says, Volkswagen gave him a T-shirt. They haven’t kept in touch.

Sepe’s most memorable journey to Stroud’s might have been four years ago.

It was the week of Sept. 11, 2001. He was living in California at the time and traveling around the state. His sister was living in Brooklyn Heights in New York and usually rode her bike to the World Trade Center every morning to catch the Staten Island Ferry. On that morning she chose to drive instead, and soon she was stopped in traffic with everyone else, watching the smoke and horror across the water. She had called her brother. He turned on the television as a jet sliced into the second tower.

Paul drove home to Palm Desert, repacked and pointed his GTI toward New York to be with his sister.

Heading toward Kansas City late in the evening of Sept. 13, he called ahead to Stroud’s. The staff stuck around, kept the place open and served his usual. And then he sat and talked with the servers in the shadow of that odd, traumatic American week.

This week he’s been working on his house, putting in a fireplace. He plans to leave Lancaster by Thursday.

Google calculates the trip to Kansas City at about 27 hours. Sepe usually makes it in 22.

After he arrives, he’ll take a nap. And by Saturday, maybe he’ll work in a barbecue lunch and a visit to the Arabia Steamboat Museum. Along with the Latin Mass at St. Vincent DePaul Roman Catholic Church, that repository of regional history is his favorite nonfood attraction in Kansas City.

And then: a late-night, New Year’s Eve plate of Stroud’s finest. If the driven past is any guide, it ought to make for one swell last supper.

Had the final meal at the old location last Friday, 12/23. We got in at 3:45 and were told it would be a 90 minute wait. We of course decided to stick it out. After only 45 minutes they called our name and we had to turn it down because the other members of our party hadn't yet arrived (we were the advance party sent to get our name on the list). The Stroud's folks were very understanding and said that when the other folks arrived we'd be at the top of the list. When we were all seated we had a wonderful sendoff; piles of fried chicken, slabs of chicken fried steak, huge bowls of mashed potatoes, boiled to death green beans with big ol' chunks of smoked pork thrown in for flavor, and of course that gravy. That not quite white, not quite brown, thick as pudding, artery clogging, taste bud comforting gravy. When we left at 6:45 there was still a crowd in the bar/waiting area and more standing outside in the warm Kansas City evening waiting to get in.

We did get "sort of" confirmation that the new location will be in an old fire station at 95th and Holmes (not Nall as stated in a previous post). I say "sort of" because no one we spoke with could say "absolutely, positively, fer sure." There was just a wee tinge of doubt in the voice, if you know what I mean. Anyway, if it all works out, they're going to have a lot of work ahead of them to achieve that same character that exists in the original location. I know there are lots of other restaurants around the country that stand in converted fire stations, but, I think most of them are much older, possessing more intrinsic character than this one. The station in question looks like it was built in the fifties or sixties at the oldest. As we drove by, Mrs. Roadhouse exclaimed, "Well, it certainly is...municipal, isn't it." On the upside, if all goes as planned, the newest incarnation of Stroud's will be pumping out brilliant fried chicken and cinnamon rolls by spring of '06. I'm already making plans to stop in when I'm in town for next October's American Royal!

Everything is on hold with Stroud's new location. According to the K.C. Star on Friday 1/27/2006, the deal for the new location could not be completed. They had the building all set to go, but they needed additional land for parking. They were unable to come to a deal with the owner, and Stroud's refused to ask the city to use eminent domain to force the sale.

CNW

quote:

Originally posted by cnw

Everything is on hold with Stroud's new location. According to the K.C. Star on Friday 1/27/2006, the deal for the new location could not be completed. They had the building all set to go, but they needed additional land for parking. They were unable to come to a deal with the owner, and Stroud's refused to ask the city to use eminent domain to force the sale.

CNW

Anyone have an idea just what made Stroud's chicken, so good. The seasoning or the cooking method? I sure could enjoy a decent piece of fried chicken (I am assuming that is the style), right now.

I was driving down Shawnee Mission in the recent few weeks and saw the new Stroud's location. I remember it as being near the First Watch. Stroud's was open for business and had a full parking lot