Anjin

About Anjin

The best new restaurant in Kansas City is also its most defiantly small. Anjin holds twenty people. It is open four nights a week. The menu changes entirely at the discretion of the kitchen. There are no concessions to mainstream palatability — no watered-down interpretations of izakaya culture designed to make hesitant diners feel comfortable. Anjin was built by Nick and Leslie Goellner and Drew Little — the team behind The Antler Room — for diners who want something specific, and who understand that a room with genuine conviction is rarer and more valuable than one designed to please everyone.

The concept is modeled after the casual Japanese eating-and-drinking establishments that line the backstreets of Tokyo and Osaka: low-key environments where sake is the organizing principle, food arrives in an informal procession of small plates, and the evening expands naturally at whatever pace the table demands. At Anjin, that means fried chicken karaage with a dipping sauce that will change your reference point for the dish; house-made tofu with dashi and a perfect amount of yuzu; skewered vegetables from Kansas farms prepared with the care of a Michelin kitchen; and a natural sake selection sourced from producers most American sommeliers have never encountered.

The physical space is deliberate in its restraint. Low light. Dark wood. The intimacy is not manufactured — it exists because the room was designed for a specific kind of experience rather than maximum revenue. Every table is a good table. The bar seating, in particular, offers one of the best positions in Kansas City dining: directly in view of the open preparation area, close enough to engage the kitchen, with a sake flight in hand and no reason to be anywhere else.

Kansas City Magazine named Anjin its Best New Restaurant of 2026. It is, in the editorial view of this publication, the most consequential opening the city has produced in several years — a restaurant that raises the expectations of everyone who dines there for what a neighborhood izakaya can be.

Best Occasion: Solo Dining

Anjin was built for the solo diner in a way that very few American restaurants are. The counter seats face the kitchen, the sake selections arrive with brief unprompted explanations from the staff, and the small plates format means you can calibrate the evening's length and intensity entirely to your own appetite. There is no social awkwardness in eating alone here — the room is structured around individual engagement with food and drink rather than the group dynamics that define most restaurant experiences. Bring a book if you want. Or just watch the kitchen. Either is a perfect evening.