Get a homespun Kansas supper, a side of gypsy jazz at dreamy new arboretum dinner series
The idyllic Bartlett Arboretum in nearby Belle Plaine has developed a reputation over the years as a place where people could enjoy a spring afternoon or summer evening on the grass, under the canopy of native trees, listening to bluegrass music often provided by the arboretum’s curly-haired caretaker Robin Macy, her husband, Ken “Kentucky” White, and their musical friends.
Now, Macy has come up with a new and delicious way to entertain people at “the arb,” as it’s commonly called.
She’s launching a new dinner series that she’s calling Live from the Whistle Stop. The dinners will happen on the first Monday of every month inside an 1876 Santa Fe railroad depot that was transplanted from Oxford to the arboretum property in 2013.
Attendees will be treated to a dinner prepared by the Soil Sisters, a group of dedicated volunteer gardeners who help Macy maintain the arboretum’s 15 acres. The Soil Sisters will occasionally get cooking help from a caterer.
They’ll also will be treated to live “first-class gypsy music,” Macy said, by guitarist White and his friend and well-known fiddler Shelby Eicher, who lives in Tulsa but will drive to town each month for the performances. Other musicians will occasionally join them.
The dinners are BYOB and will cost $50 a person, Macy said. She’ll have enough room for about 40 people at each dinner.
The events will be treated as fundraisers for several arboretum-related missions Macy is passionate about, she said, including her annual Tree House Concert Series and the Quiet Zone Initiative, a project aimed at finding safe ways to stop the 100-decibel train whistles from sounding as they pass through Belle Plaine throughout the day.
Macy put on a test run earlier in the month and drew a full house of friends and supporters, who were treated to a meal of chicken, salad, glazed carrots and buckeye pie. Many of the vegetables served at the dinner were harvested from the on-site “hoop house,” where the Soil Sisters are growing produce.
“It’s not your high-end, hoity-toity many plate settings kind of dinner,” she said. “It’s more a homespun supper.”
Macy said the idea for the dinners came from friends she and White had made at Luciano’s, a popular Italian restaurant in nearby Mulvane.
For years, she said, White and Eicher had been booked as the Monday-evening entertainment at the restaurant, and they’d developed quite a following. But recently, Luciano’s owners decided to close the restaurant on Monday and Tuesday nights.
“The people at Luciano’s who had become our friends said, ‘Well, let’s just do it at the arb,“ Macy said. “So we just decided to take that energy and turn it into arboretum energy.”
The next dinner is on Feb. 3, and people can make reservations on the Barlett Arboretum website, www.bartlettarboretum.com.
The dinners start at 6 p.m., but when the weather warms up in April, Macy will start the dinners an hour earlier and offer an appetizer and a tour of the grounds.
The arboretum is a 30 minute drive south of Wichita. Of the $50 ticket price, $40 will be tax deductible.
This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 11:54 AM.
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