In some respects, a flashy celebrity steakhouse means the same thing everywhere. But it means something else in Kansas City, a cowtown whose economic engine was its stockyards, once the second-largest in the country, and which has struggled for years to cultivate a high-end dining scene. We have some great restaurants, but fundamentally, we’re a city that loathes to dress for dinner. (I felt a swell of civic pride when I learned Travis proposed to Taylor Swift in shorts.) I wondered how Noble 33—the Miami-based fine-dining restaurant group tasked with executing 15 and 87’s vision—would fare here.
In a pure business sense, they seem to be faring just fine. On a recent visit, a server told me that a group of Taylor Swift fans had waited six hours for bar seats, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the singer housing a truffle grilled cheese. Taylor didn’t show. I wish the restaurant had something else to offer them.
If nothing else, 1587 Prime looks nice. The 238-seat, two-story restaurant inside the Loews Kansas City Hotel is riddled with luxury tropes. Everything is bathed in a charmed, golden light. The stairs are marble, the tables are marble, and the servers all wear smart white coats and black ties. The leather-backed menus are enormous—perilous. Manipulating them at a small table covered with expensive glassware made me feel like a horse on roller skates.
Music is ostensibly a theme. Every night, local musicians perform short sets of Motown, jazz, and soul hits, and the performers are universally talented. They’re also chastely miked. The live backing band is never loud enough to compete with diners’ conversation, and while the singers roam around the dining room, they seem trained in the art of extremely brief eye contact that asks nothing of you in return.
The same can’t be said of the patrons. Every time I looked around the room, diners looked back with the defiant stares of people who are used to being watched. The restaurant seems to be drawing in its target clients: people who fly private. On my first visit, our server—a very friendly woman named Debbie—told us she had two tables that had flown in just for dinner.
“There’s this thing I learned about,” she said. “Did you know they have an Uber Jet?”
I did not. I sensed that Debbie and I had both learned this against our will.
To be fair, one of the reasons I kept looking around the room was that everyone’s drinks were on fire. This was, I learned, The Alchemy ($22), a cocktail the restaurant created for Taylor Swift, a woman who has never had to use Uber Jet.
I ordered one, too, and a dedicated server brought out a martini glass with some steel wool tangled around the stem. (Something else to know about 1587 Prime: there are at least two employees whose main job appears to be setting things on fire.)
“How many tables order this every night?” I asked.
“Almost all of them,” she said, with just a hint of resignation.
The Alchemy is in a section of cocktails titled “The Players,” named for the steakhouse’s famous guests. For Mahomes fans, there’s the “Showtime” ($19), a rum and coconut cocktail made with a “Coors Light syrup” that I tragically could not taste. I preferred Kelce’s “Big Yeti” ($24), a nocino-enhanced old fashioned with bitter chocolate notes.
There is a fourth cocktail in the section, named after Brittany Mahomes. I will not be tricked into commenting on it.
The drinks were designed by beverage director Juan Carlos Santana, who’s led menu design at other Noble 33 haunts. This is the only way I can explain why a steakhouse cocktail menu features a “Noble Margarita” ($18), or why the house martini ($23) is laced with fino sherry and fennel-infused Italicus (a sweet, sunny bergamot liqueur). It’s a lovely, nuanced cocktail, and it seems to have been designed in a lab to piss off martini drinkers.
If you’re after a more traditional martini—say, gin and vermouth—you can order the martini “your way” for an extra $10.
“Isn’t this a service most bars offer for free?” my husband asked.
Sure. But most bars don’t come with a “Martini Cart Experience.” The first part of the Experience is using a checklist and a golf pencil to select your ideal spirits, vermouths, and enhancements, whether that’s truffle brine (an additional $5), caviar-stuffed olives (an extra $12) or an accompanying “caviar bump” ($21).
The second part of the Experience is waiting for the cart. The restaurant only has space for one cart per floor, which can create backlogs when multiple tables order martinis. On my first visit, my table waited a modest 12 minutes before the cart became available.
The Experience concluded with a bartender scanning my checklist, building the martini, shaking it (you read that correctly), and straining it into a glass that had been chilled by a light-up contraption resembling a Simon. With the upcharge for the truffle brine, the martini was $38. (...)
Perhaps my mistake was ordering it with a “tableside flambé,” which you can add to any steak here for an extra $27. After conferring with Debbie about whether this was a good idea, she dispatched a second cart with a second fire-oriented employee.
While he worked, I peppered him with questions. Did he man the flambé cart every night? Yes, by choice. “I’ve never worked in a kitchen,” he said. “I just really like fire.” Had he ever singed his shirtsleeves on the cart? “I’m going to tell you guys a little secret,” he replied. He leaned over the table and brushed some hair away from his forehead. Most of his eyebrows were missing.
by Liz Cook, Defector | Read more:
Images: uncredited
