Chicken? Check. Beer? Check. Kansas City bar hidden away in Swope Park keeps it simple

Miss D has worked in restaurants up and down Kansas City’s East Side.

Wings and Things. Steak ‘Em, Take ‘Em. Louisiana Fresh Fish. On Prospect Avenue, she’s opened both an ice cream shop and a diner. She started in kitchens when she was 13. She’s 46 now.

Miss D — real name: Dwanda Lee-Smith — still works on the East Side. But these days, she runs a joint where the view out the front door is more bucolic backwoods than urban grit. It is hard to find: a green country shack located off a winding road along the southeast edge of Swope Park.

The bar and grill at 7500 Oldham Road had long been called Percy’s, named after Percy Collins, the gentleman who opened it back in 1953.

“I was a customer of Percy’s,” Lee-Smith said. “My dad and I used to shoot pool and drink there together. It was always a dream to have this place.”

Miss D bought Percy’s in 2015. She kept the name until last year, when she changed it to Just Chicken N Beer. These days, you can find her serving wings and tenders from a walk-up window inside while the bartender keeps the clientele sufficiently lubricated.

The new name is imprecise — Just Chicken N Beer serves cocktails, fish and fried mushrooms too, and is home to a dance floor and several pool tables — but it reflects Miss D’s simple vision of the place.

“I’ve been known for my fried chicken forever,” she said. “I just wanted to highlight that, but without changing the ‘Cheers’ feel that Percy’s had. We’re just a nice bar and grill type of atmosphere with good, home-cooked, freshly fried chicken.”

One day a few years after Miss D took over, a stranger stopped in. He ordered a drink and gazed about the bar with a kind of solemn intent.

“I got the feeling he was somebody,” she said. “Then when he stepped out on the patio, he broke down and cried. That’s when he told me who he was.”

The man’s name was Dean Collins, the son of Percy Collins. Percy had died in the late 1980s and left the bar to Dean, who sold it a few years later.

“It was his father’s legacy, and I think (Dean) was heartbroken that he had left it behind and didn’t look back for so many years,” Miss D said.

Now, she said, Dean comes back every summer to visit. (The Star was unable to reach him.) He has shared memories with Miss D, which has helped her fill in the gaps of Percy’s past.

He told her Percy Collins once owned approximately 30 acres in the area, some of which he eventually sold to the nearby Memorial Park Cemetery. Dean and three siblings were raised in a house next door to the bar. Percy’s was a cop bar back in the 1950s and ‘60s.

“Some of the things I have on the wall, if you moved them off, you’ll see bullet holes,” she said. “Supposedly, that’s from when the police and detectives would do target practice in here.”

The Collinses were white, and so were the bar’s two subsequent owners, who operated Percy’s in the 1990s and 2000s. The area is now predominantly Black, and Miss D takes pride in the representation she brings to her ownership.

“I’m the first Black person to own it, and the first woman,” she said.

Vewiser Dixon, an East Side developer and business owner, said he recognized that Miss D “had what it takes” as a teenager, when she worked at Wings and Things, the local chain he started.

“She’s a risk taker and a survivor,” Dixon said. “Even as a child, she demonstrated that. She was managing a restaurant while she was still in high school.” (She later married Dixon’s son, too, though they are now divorced.)

Just Chicken N Beer lies across Oldham Road from Swope Park, not technically inside it. But the setting is still pastoral. An old red barn sits a block down the road, also on private property, and though Interstate 435 is less than half a mile away, the roar of traffic is buffered by woods.

Day business has been down, Miss D said. Until a few years ago, the Kansas City Police Department kept the horses for its mounted patrol division in a Swope Park stable just up the street. But that unit was disbanded in 2019 to free up city budget funds due to increased violence in the city.

“The mounted police used to eat lunch with me several times a week,” she said. “But they’re gone now. The park workers and the (Hillcrest) golf workers still come in a little, but not as much. And there’s no bus route along this street. So for now, I’ve been closed during the day in the winter months.”

Nights are better. Thursdays and Sundays are typically busy for dollar wings and dollar drinks between 7 and 10 p.m. (The dollar drinks — a tequila sunrise, a “Blue MF” made from blue Curacao, vodka, gin, rum and tequila — are small, pre-batched, made with well liquor and not for the faint of stomach.) On those nights, Miss D brings in a rap and R&B DJ who presides over a dance floor lined with LED lights and walls of mirrors. On Fridays, you might find customers gathered around a fire pit off the back patio.

Miss D said she intends to renovate the patio this summer. She has other plans, too, like opening a cigar lounge in the house next door, where Percy raised his kids 70 years ago.

“Everybody knew Percy’s,” she said. “I didn’t want to go changing it right off. But I’m building my own identity here, too.”