New downtown Wichita hotel will also have a sleek cocktail lounge, restaurant
Months ago, a mysterious red-and-black sign that read “Broadway Lounge Bar” appeared on the historic building on the southwest corner of Douglas and Broadway — right across the street from the Ambassador Hotel.
But it became apparent pretty quickly that the mystery bar would be a part of the fancy, 11-story AC Marriott hotel, which has been planned for years for the old Brown Building at 150 S. Broadway.
Now, opening day for the hotel — and the luxurious lounge inside — is just a month away. The AC Marriott is set to open on July 16.
This week, the hotel offered a tour of the sleek new property, which developer Sudha Tokala is adding as a complement to the other projects she’s brought to that section of Broadway, including the Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine, the Kansas Health Science Center and the WSU Tech culinary school.
Inside, it’s almost completely finished and features 118 rooms, a large fitness center, and three meeting spaces.
But the big draw — for locals, anyway — will likely be the lush main-floor lounge, which will offer breakfast in the morning then turn into a gin-focused tapas bar in the evening.
The new hotel will be the first AC Marriott in Kansas. The AC brand was started in Spain in 1999 by a hotelier named Antonio Catalan, hence the “AC.” A decade later, Catalan made a deal with Marriott, who wanted to use his design worldwide.
The AC Marriott hotels spread through Spain and Europe, and the first one opened in the United States in 2015. Today, there are around 150 AC Marriott hotels in the United States and 250 worldwide. (The ones closest to Wichita are in Kansas City, Missouri, and in Oklahoma City.)
AC Marriott hotels all have similar food and beverage programs and focus on European-style breakfast and upscale lounges that offer Spanish-style small plates, or tapas. Each individual property also adds its own market-appropriate touches.
The new Wichita lounge features floor-to-ceiling windows facing both Douglas and Broadway and a fenced-in patio with room for 20 on the Douglas-facing side.
The interior boasts high ceilings, marble floors and modern furnishings. The centerpiece is a four-sided marble bar lined with black leather bar stools. Above the bar is an eye-catching and dramatic cascading glass chandelier.
Positioned around the bar are seating areas made up of deep leather couches, leather chairs and wooden coffee tables. On the other side of the space are marble tables and a breakfast bar that will serve the hotel’s morning crowds.
The breakfast service in Wichita will be open to the public as well as to hotel guests. For $15.99, people can help themselves to a bar that will be laden with European meats and cheeses sliced by a high-dollar Berkel stand slicer set up at the end of the bar. They’ll also be able to get croissants that are imported from France, said the hotel’s general manager, Jeff Barnett.
Breakfast customers also will find European breads, warm pastries, local honey, fresh fruit, cereal and yogurt at the bar, and each person will be able to order one fresh-made hot egg dish from the kitchen. They’ll choose between an open-faced toast with scrambled eggs, manchego cheese, arugula and prosciutto; or a cazuela (bowl) made with egg, manchego cheese and prosciutto.
Breakfast will be offered from 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Mondays through Fridays and from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.
At 4 p.m. each day, the hotel will dim the lights, turn up the music and turn the lounge into more of a nightlife destination.
The bar will start mixing up drinks, and it will have a gin focus, since Spain is one of the world’s leading gin consumers. The bar’s featured drink will be the gin and tonic, and it will offer two varieties.
The bar also will focus on whiskey and will offer a smoked old fashioned and a lower-alcohol bitter orange spritz.
Each AC Marriott property also is required to come up with three of its own cocktails, and customers in Wichita will be able to order the Wichita Starlight, made with Woodford Bourbon, elderflower liqueur, fresh lemon, local honey and bitters; a cocktail on tap called the Sunflower Cooler, made with Boot Hill vodka, peach schnapps, fresh lime, simple syrup and club soda; and a take on the espresso martini that will be called Wichita Sunset and will be made with Boot Hill vodka, Baileys, cream, butterscotch schnapps and simple syrup.
The bar also will offer several beers, including two local craft brews on tap, as well as a wine list that includes reds, whites, roses, sparkling wines and sherry.
Most AC Marriott hotels focus just on small-plate dishes, and Wichita’s will have plenty of those. But managers determined that the Wichita market would also desire heartier dishes, so it’s offering several dinner-sized entrees: a Croque Monsieur, meatballs with toast, grilled salmon with spiced lentil stew, a burger, and a flat iron steak served with crispy potatoes.
The menu also will feature various toasts, including one topped with garlic shrimp and roasted tomatoes, and its selection of small plates will include a Tortilla Espanola topped with eggs, potato and onion; a rigatoni with tomato sauce; an artisanal ham and cheese plate; and a prosciutto, olive and manchego cheese plate.
Offerings also include a few salads and a selection of bar snacks, including pickled vegetables and Marcona almonds.
“It’s going to be a really unique vibe,” Barnett said. “We’re really excited about it.”
Food will be served in the lounge from 4 to 10 p.m. nightly. The bar will stay open until 11 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays and until midnight Fridays and Saturdays.
1920s touches
Designers of the hotel were able to maintain many historic features from the Brown Building, which most recently was known as Broadway Plaza and until 2019 was still home to businesses like the Specialists Group, a recruiting and staffing firm.
Inside the main entrance off of Broadway, hotel guests will find the ornate plaster ceilings fitted with two original art deco lamps. The hotel also saved the gold trim around the elevator doors and even salvaged an old clock crews found in the building, which hangs near the elevators.
Other original touches also were preserved, including the hexagon-tiled stairs that lead to guest rooms on the upper levels.
History buffs who take a close look at the building will notice that it still has an etched sign reading “Brown Building” near the top.
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The structure was officially completed as a six-story structure in late 1926, back when Broadway was still called Lawrence. The first-floor corner spot was leased to The Tilford Drug Co., and the Princess Lunch room took over the main-floor spot facing Broadway.
The second and third floors were leased to ”modern shops” like Cox’s Hosiery, and the three upper floors were office spaces.
Crews built the foundation strong enough to support four to six more stories, and in 1928, five more were added.
The building was bought and sold and auctioned several times over the years. Tokala bought it around 2018.
AC Marriott Hotel lounge menus
This story was originally published June 18, 2025 at 2:52 PM.
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