‘Little restaurant on the prairie’: Chef opens eatery inside a former Flint Hills church
He’s long owned a restaurant in Winfield, and last year, he launched a short-lived Wichita restaurant in the former Logan’s Roadhouse space on Rock Road.
Now, he’s started something new, the type of “little restaurant on the prairie” that he’s always dreamed of opening.
Chef Stan Lerner, the owner of Winfield’s Chef’s Table and the former owner of Chef’s Table Roadhouse at 353 S. Rock Road in Wichita, has just quietly opened a restaurant inside an old church building on the edge of Strong City, a small but popular tourist destination in the scenic Flint Hills. He’s calling it Chef Stan’s Place.
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Lerner said he took over the building, which is at 225 Church St., months ago and has been slowly rehabbing it as a side project. It was built around 1905 and operated as a church until the 1940s. Since then, it’s served as an American Legion Hall and, most recently, a youth technology center.
Lerner rehabbed the church, which sits just about a mile from the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, peeling off the old linoleum, restoring the original wood floors and ripping away dry wall covering windows that now offer sweeping views of the prairie on three sides of the dining room.
His idea, he said, was to provide a place where tourists and locals could grab lunch on the weekdays or while out on a Sunday. Eating options in the area during those times are limited, he said.
For now, he’s open only for lunch and is offering a straightforward menu that features prairie bread, which is made from homemade sourdough that’s fried in a cast iron skillet. He uses it to construct egg salad and pulled chicken sandwiches. He also serves grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, a daily quiche, a salad and desserts like cookies and lemon bars.
By this fall, he plans to add dinner hours and will serve steak and salmon entrees similar to what he had at Chef’s Table Roadhouse, which was open in Wichita from October until April. Lerner said he decided then that the economy and labor situation would make it too hard to continue there.
Though he hopes people will appreciate the simple food at Chef Stan’s Place, the highlight of the restaurant is the building itself, Lerner said.
He’s furnished the dining room with a long community table as well as with a few smaller tables around the periphery. There’s seating for 32 people, who can gaze out the windows and see across the fields to the water tower in the distance. Every half hour or so, though, a train passes by, and people can feel the rumble.
“It’s surreal,” he said. “It’s like you’re on a movie set.”
Initially, Lerner wasn’t planning to open until Aug. 1, but locals and people passing through just started finding the place, he said. He decided to open early and has been serving since Thursday.
Hours for now are 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays through Fridays. Saturday is the only day he’s closed.
For now, his Winfield restaurant — Chef’s Table at 815 Main St. — isn’t open. He closed it just after the Fourth of July when the coil in his air conditioner failed. He usually closes for the month of August anyway, he said, so he’s decided not to reopen that restaurant until just before the big Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield in September.
That will give him time to fine tune his little prairie restaurant, he said.
“My ultimate dream as a chef was to have a place on the prairie and make prairie bread and have just a really pure old-school eating experience,” he said. “There’s no bar. There’s no TV screens. I wanted to give people an escape, a rural retreat.”
This story was originally published July 27, 2021 at 12:43 PM.
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