A Wichita breakfast restaurant concept is expanding into Kansas City’s Brookside area
Jon Rolph’s Thrive Restaurant Group opened its first HomeGrown breakfast and lunch restaurant in May 2017 at 29th and Maize Road, and since then, it’s opened two more — one downtown in the Spaghetti Works District and the other at Bradley Fair.
Now, says Rolph, he’s ready to open a fourth, but this one won’t be in Wichita.
On Monday, Rolph was in Kansas City picking up the keys to a 4,690 square-foot site that recently was home to a restaurant called Avenues Bistro, which the Kansas City Star reported just left the space after 15 years in business.
The new Kansas City HomeGrown should be open by July, Rolph said.
This is the first restaurant in the Kansas City area for Thrive, which also owns Carlos O’ Kelly’s as well as 81 Applebee’s restaurants. Rolph said that the closest the company ever got to Kansas City were the Carlos O’ Kelly’s restaurants in Lawrence and in St. Joseph, Missouri.
“The thought always from the time we conceived of HomeGrown was to have a new growth concept,” Rolph said. “We wanted to prove it out in our home town first under our own microscope and make sure we felt good about it before we took it out of town.”
Brookside, a trendy Kansas City neighborhood south of Country Club Plaza with lots of upscale restaurants and shops, felt like a good fit, Rolph said. It’s a tight community, and a farmers market operates near the space where HomeGrown will open.
“We went and looked all over Kansas City, and Kansas City has a lot of communities within it,” Rolph said. “Brookside as a place to launch HomeGrown really just fits our brand and who we are.”
Rolph said he hopes that he’ll be able to open “multiple” locations of HomeGrown in the Kansas City area.
“That first one out of market is always a big one,” he said. “We’ll be really watching to see how it’s received.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2021 at 10:57 AM.
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