The Town Company

The Restaurant

The Town Company occupies the ground floor of Hotel Kansas City, the 144-room boutique property carved out of the 1923 Kansas City Club building at Baltimore and 13th, two blocks from Power & Light District. The dining room is a restoration tour de force — coffered ceilings, marble pilasters, original Belgian-glass windows running the length of Baltimore Avenue — and chef Johnny Leach, a James Beard Foundation Best Chef Midwest nominee, runs the kitchen with a focus on hearth-fired Midwestern cooking. The hearth itself sits in the open kitchen at the back of the room, the fire visible from every table.

The menu changes seasonally but the format is steady: a small section of raw and chilled (oysters, hamachi crudo, a beef tartare); hearth-fired vegetables (charred carrots with whipped feta, blistered shishitos); pasta (a hand-rolled bucatini with Missouri trout roe is a signature); and the main fire-cooking — a 16-ounce ribeye, a hearth-roasted half chicken, a whole roasted snapper, and a daily wood-fire fish. Leach's cooking is restrained and ingredient-led; the food does not try to outshine the room, which is part of why the combination works.

The wine list runs about 180 references with a particular focus on small-grower Burgundy, Loire whites, and Missouri-Augusta-region producers (Adam Puchta, Augusta Winery) that surprise out-of-town diners. Service is hotel-trained — attentive without performance — and the bar at the front of the room (Nighthawk, accessed from the same entrance) is one of the best cocktail rooms in the city. For visitors staying at Hotel Kansas City, the dining option is genuinely as strong as anywhere a cab ride away.