| In the 1950s, Cafe Picardy was the place for dining and dancing. |
This week's review is of a new Leawood restaurant, 77 South, which is boldly trying to revive the concept of eating and shaking one's groove thing in the same venue. It brought back memories for a lot of Fat City readers; I received several e-mails from people who ate -- and danced -- at the most famous disco-dining nightspot in Kansas City history: Victor Fontana's Fanny's.
I missed out on Fanny's -- it closed before I moved to Kansas City in the early 1980s -- but stories about the restaurant in its wild heyday still circulate among people who dined on its fancy Northern Italian cuisine and then strutted their stuff on the dance floor in the center of the restaurant. The building still stands in Westport; it was the location of a series of popular (and often controversial) nightclubs right through the 1990s. The last time I was in the building, a few months ago, it was a flea market.
Before Fanny's, there were a half-dozen restaurants in downtown Kansas City that offered dining and dancing in the era before disco: Eddy's Supper Club on Baltimore, the former Cafe Picardy in the Hotel Muehlebach, the Drum Room in the President Hotel, and others.
Today, diners can kick up their heels at the Copa Room in Lenexa, Chaz on the Plaza in the Raphael Hotel, the Oak Room Lounge at the InterContinental Hotel, the Gaslight Grill in Leawood, and the new 77 South.
Am I leaving any places out, Fat City readers?
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