Denis Culinary Tours

Fast Service, Quality Food, & Living Wages CAN co-exist! Strip's will feature Chicken Strips, Pork Burgers, & Donuts There’s a new restaurant concept emerging in Olathe, bringing together previously opposing concepts: made-from-scratch recipes, the blazing speed and convenience of  “fast food”, and employees making living wages. Mix all that together and top it with a business culture of social responsibility and community involvement and it seems the old saying “you can’t please everyone” may become a thing of the past. Strip's is scheduled to open in August 2016, at 1110 East Santa Fe in Olathe, Kansas, breathing new life into a former Wendy's building. “The Wendy’s building is perfect for this concept because it already has 4 exhaust hoods and a large kitchen to allow for the extensive amount of prep work that will need to be done. Our pork burger will be custom-ground for us by Fritz’s Meats and they will also create our bacon. Our chicken strips will ...

Adventures in Leawood and South OP  Now you may think using the words adventure and Leawood and South Overland Park in the same sentence are incongruous. Not so. A couple of weeks ago I had an evening that combined two fab experiences. One was eating of course. Along with a Kansas City Restaurant Guide crew, I ate first at Sullivan’s Steak House, who treated us to a divine dinner. There appeared like magic from our excellent server: crispy calamari done just right, tender prime rib (on the menu weekends), broiled salmon that still managed to taste just caught, corn casserole, some veggies, and a dark, rich, decadent chocolate cake (can I get in more adjectives here?) in a strawberry puree full of flavor. Yum. Repeat that. I was sorry I was full – I could have done it all over again.  What I didn’t remember about Sullivan’s is that, with about 18 of them from Anchorage to Baton Rouge, they are a member of the excellent Del Frisco’s group but their executive chef...

Sunday, July 24 2016 1:00 PM — 4:00 PM Classic Album Sundays KC: David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust and more Classic Album Sundays is the world’s most popular listening experience and Kansas City is now part of this worldwide series.  Classic Album Sundays provides an immersive experience where you will not only hear the story behind the album but will also hear it in a way you never have before on world-class hi-fi equipment. Come celebrate the life and career of David Bowie with Classic Album Sundays.  With ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, David Bowie turned a popular art form, pop music, into high-performance art. Bowie lived and breathed the character of his own construction until it nearly consumed him. Contextually, Ziggy Stardust, The Stooges, Lou Reed and Roxy Music’s debut helped signal the end of the sixties and the hippy movement and marked the musical and stylistic transition into glam rock and punk. Read more about the alb...

The World's Best Wine Lists Revealed We are delighted to announce that Story has won a prestigious two-star award in the World of Fine Wine "World's Best Wine Lists Awards" for 2016. The awards are judged by a panel containing some of the world's leading wine critics and sommeliers from around the globe including Alder Yarrow, Elin McCoy, Ch'ng Poh Tiong, Andrew Jefford, Andreas Larsson, Francis Percival, and Editor Neil Beckett. The judges assessed well over 4,500 wine lists from restaurants around the world before coming up with the final 817 one-, two- and three-star wine lists. Only 290 restaurants were recognized for the esteemed two-star award. This award would not have been possible without you. Thank you for your support of our wine program.  Cheers!  Join us for our Next Wine Dinner Wines from the South of France Featuring Special Guest, Jerome Jeandin of Monsieur Touton Importer Wine...

I like writing about chefs, mostly because most of them have so much more going on behind the plates you see. In this era of Celebrity Chefs and the countless TV shows, blogs, pages on Facebook, there are some real human beings out there who work incredible hours (usually) incredibly hard. And as near as I can tell, if you’re not Emeril Lagasse or Gordon Ramsey or Bobby Flay (I ate at Bar Americain a few weeks ago in NYC – and it was delicious, much as I wanted to think it would mostly be hype), being a KC chef isn’t going to make you a millionaire anytime soon.  I’ve already written in this space about several chefs in town: Zeb Humphrey of North Italia , Brian Aaron of Tannin Wine Bar and Kitchen , Erik Hyre at Hereford House and Pierpont’s among others. I realize that while interviewing can be a precarious search for knowledge, it’s always interesting to summarize a life, a career, an attitude, and a personality into a few paragraphs. Because it’s an inherently unfa...

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day . . . wrote Maimonides, Jewish scholar of the 1100s.  You know the rest. He had a larger point in mind but right now, I’m just interested in the fish.  To be precise, eating that fish in Kansas City.  Here we are, in the beef and pork-chompin’ mid-belly of the country and I’m suggesting we all could easily eat, and enjoy, more fish. You don’t need to be an ichthyologist to appreciate these wonders of the seas and lakes.   Mythology I probably need to begin with a bit of educating.  Let’s start off with why NOT to eat fish.  This is otherwise known as Fish Myths 101.   1.   By the time fish gets to K.C., it’s  already too old .  Truth: We can get fish here within 24 hours of it being caught.    2. Seafood is too high in cholesterol, especially shrimp.   Truth: Seafood in general contains a high level of cholesterol; however it is low in saturated fats. Thus it has littl...

It deserves your presence. The Final Cut Steakhouse in the Hollywood Casino has not been my first choice for a steak place. For starters, it’s in a casino. But a bit ago, I wandered on through and had one of the best rib eyes I’ve had in Kansas City – the Final Cut Tomahawk Chop. There’s not much I can say about perfection, but even with the bone-in, this Australian wagyu 28 ounce master was both terrifying and inviting. Fortunately, there’s no law that says you must finish your meal and I didn’t even have to lie about having a dog.  Everything I had that night was excellent, but what I want to tell you about are four reasons you should give this place a shot if you haven’t already. Two of them are Wednesdays and Thursdays: you can get their KC strip with a loaded baked potato and soup or salad for 20 bucks and add an app or dessert at half price. Or you could also choose their Surf and Turf for just $30 – that’s a 7 ounce filet accompanied by a crab cake, scallops, s...