Classic Wichita Valentine diner has reopened again, this time with a soul food twist
It opens. It closes. It opens. It closes.
Then it opens again.
Brints Diner, the historic pre-fab Valentine Diner at 4834 E. Lincoln that first opened in 1960, has new owners, and they reopened it earlier this month. It had been sitting empty for about a year.
Shea Nelson is now in charge of the kitchen and reopened Brints with the help of her three siblings. Previously, she owned a food truck called Lil Truck Big Bites, which was taco-focused and roamed the streets of Wichita and the festival circuit for about a year and a half. The truck closed just before the Nelson siblings took control of the Brints.
The new menu has some of the diner items Brints customers have counted on throughout the various switches of ownership, including a full breakfast menu and lots of sandwiches. But Shea has also added some soul food touches, offering things like fried catfish, fried chicken, mac and cheese and pork chops.
She’s also offering a few things that were popular on her food truck, including tacos (which are $1 each on Taco Tuesdays) and an invention called the Fry Daddy, which features fries topped with cheese, tomato, sour cream and picante sauce.
Brints is now open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays.
Chase Nelson, Shea’s brother, is handling marketing for the new diner and said the siblings visited the restaurant several times as kids.
His sister had developed a following with the food truck, he said, and she wanted to build on that.
“She would get a large amount of customers coming to her and we thought that if we had a convenient location, that would be good,” he said. “We came to an agreement that we could put our family recipe and traditions behind it.
The diner has been through many owners over the years.
Most recently, chef Jeremiah Harvey and a partner announced plans to reopen it, but those feel through. The diner is famous not only for its 2007 inclusion on Guy Fieri’s show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” but also for operating inside a Valentine diner. About 2,000 of the buildings were made by Wichita’s Valentine Manufacturing between 1938 and 1971, and architecture buffs are still passionate about them.
Chase Nelson said he’s confident he and his siblings can break the cycle of ownership turnover at the diner.
“We think we can keep it open for a long, long, long, long time,” he said.
This story was originally published November 22, 2019 at 10:16 AM.
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