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The movie was based on a real-life trapper, Jeremiah "Crow Eater" Johnson, who, according to one report, "had been scalped and left for dead by a Crow war party and after he recovered ... hunted down the warriors, killed them and ate part of their livers."
Liver, I'm happy to report, is not a specialty of Jeremiah Johnson's, the $3.5 million sports bar and restaurant in Kansas City, North. There are steaks, grilled fish, burgers, and delicious chicken soup, but nothing the real "Crow Eater" might have sampled in his lonely mountain shack. The real Jeremiah, however, isn't really an issue for the restaurant's owner, Tom Norsworthy, who didn't even know the Redford film had been based on an actual historical figure. The woodprint illustration of a nineteenth-century trapper on the restaurant's menu (and dramatically enlarged in black and white paint on the enclosed dome of the sports bar) isn't the actual Johnson but a bearded gentleman in a soft-brimmed hat whom Norsworthy discovered in a book of historical portraits. He can't remember who the man was, not that it matters.
Norsworthy isn't even a fan of Redford's Jeremiah Johnson ("It was kind of forgettable") but watched the film years ago and liked the name. "It had a nice ring to it, so I kept it on the back burner to use for a restaurant someday," he says. Over the past decade, Norsworthy has expanded the local 54th Street Grill empire (he's building the seventh of those moderately priced bar-and-grill venues in Grandview), and he says he's ready to launch a new venture: a place to drink and eat home-style food, but more upscale than the 54th Street Grills and with a menu prepared from scratch. "Only 50 percent of the menu at the 54th Street Grills is made from scratch," Norsworthy says. "It's difficult to do."
Difficult, yes, but a definite drawing card for his new, high-testosterone restaurant, which is dominated by a central atrium-style bar with a 22-foot ceiling and eleven big-screen TVs tuned to major sporting events. The bar isn't my favorite place to eat (although it's easier to get a table in that noisy, smoke-filled room than in the two smaller dining areas on either side of it), but I settled for a cozy booth there on my first visit because I was too hungry to wait thirty minutes for a nonsmoking table.
The noise level in this tiled room can seem jarring at first -- "It's like eating in an auditorium or a train station," my friend Ron said -- but our beautiful young server was so unflustered and adorable that we quickly calmed down, even though we could hear only every third or fourth word she said. "Can ... I ... drink?" she said, flashing a Julia Roberts smile. Then she handed us no fewer than four menus: one for food, the others devoted to beer, margaritas and wine. "I'll ... back," she said, and vanished.
Ron looked at the assortment of patrons perched at the bar: tanned jocks in polo shirts reading the sports pages or chatting with pretty thirtysomethings squeezed into capris and sequined belts. I wouldn't call it a pickup bar (at least during the dinner hours), but there was definitely some sexual tension bouncing off the hard surfaces. It reminded me of a line in Jeremiah Johnson, when Will Geer (playing a crusty old trapper) says, "I loves the womens, I surely do. But I swear, a woman's breast is the hardest rock that the Almighty ever made on this earth."
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