On Kansas City’s East Side, a mixed plate of barbecue, blues and booze
In the early 1960s, before he was a barbecue kingpin, Ollie Gates opened a jazz club at 31st Street and Indiana Avenue. It was called OG’s, and for nearly a decade it was a nightlife anchor on Kansas City’s East Side, a see-and-be-seen destination in the predominantly Black neighborhood.
“It was the hottest spot around,” recalled Darcus Gates, now Ollie’s daughter-in-law, who grew up at 41st Street and College Avenue. “I was just a kid, but I’d get excited just watching my parents get dressed up to go to OG’s.”
OG’s is long gone — it closed in 1970 — and the East Side has struggled with disinvestment in the decades since the 1968 race riots.
That includes bars. There aren’t many proper watering holes on the East Side these days.
Darcus has access to one, though. Her husband is George Gates, who as chief operating officer of Gates Bar-B-Q oversees the local chain’s five restaurants and real estate holdings. And inside the Gates at 1221 Brooklyn, in a cavernous space past a short hallway to the left of the entrance, is a bar and lounge.
A former nightclub performer who sang in hotels up and down the Las Vegas strip for 30 years before moving back to Kansas City in the late 2000s, Darcus thought the space could be repurposed for live music. During the pandemic, she hung up some drapes to block out sound from the bar, added a spotlight and cleared out some room for a stage.
The result is Darcus After Dark, a weekly Friday night show that in its own way is a throwback to the original OG’s. For the last two years, it has been attracting a mature East Side crowd hungry for ribs with a side of rhythm.
“I see it as a platform for artists that I feel in my heart have a lot of potential,” Darcus said. “This gives them a space to hone their craft and learn to be better entertainers.”
On the first Friday of October, the entertainment came courtesy of Tiff and the Band, a smooth jazz- and R&B-inflected foursome led by singer Tiffaney Whitt, who by day works as an assistant principal at Washington High School in Kansas City, Kansas. Darcus came across her performing a few years ago at an open mic inside Parlor, the Crossroads food hall.
“It’s small and intimate, which I really like,” Whitt said. “The audience here is so engaged. You can connect with them. I feel free here in a way I don’t in other places.”
This mixed plate of barbecue and late-night jazz — the music starts at 8 p.m. and goes for three sets — is also an homage to the original restaurant at 19th and Vine, called Gates Ol’ Kentuck Bar-B-Q.
“My grandfather, who was also named George, didn’t open till almost 2 a.m. in those early years,” George Gates said. “When the jazz clubs let out, that’s when they opened up.”
Ollie, a bricklayer by trade, helped erect the building at 1221 Brooklyn in the late 1950s. The lounge back then was called The Pit. It was a kind of clubhouse for some of the activists and power brokers who would eventually form the influential East Side political organization Freedom Inc.
“Politicians and judges would hang out in the back, playing cards and drinking,” George Gates said. “It was like a private club that wasn’t private. Then in 1975, we made it a Gates restaurant and gave The Pit a Mexican cantina type of theme.”
Some of those motifs remain: arched brick doorways, Spanish tile, stained glass, a sombrero-clad statue of a character named Poncho. The lounge, which opens every day at 11 a.m., still draws a loyal day crowd of older Black gentlemen who live nearby: Quincy, Clyde, Johnny, Jesse. A fellow who goes by the name Junk Man.
“I’m a 12th Street Boy,” said William Burton, a glass of wine resting on the bar in front of him. “I went to school at 11th and Tracy. I’m an Air Force veteran. I’ve been coming here since 1979. It’s a neighborhood situation. There aren’t many bars around here like there used to be.”
“There’s no trouble here,” agreed Big Paul, a retired bus driver. “That’s what I like about it. I’m usually in during the day. But I like this Friday night thing they’re doing too.”
It was getting to be show time. Darcus took the mic to introduce Tiff and the Band. The keyboard player laid down a jazzy groove and Tiff’s thunderous voice began to fill the room. The crowd whooped and the camera phones came out. The party was underway.
After a few songs, Darcus escaped down the hall to join George and her friend Rhonda Iverson in a circle booth in the restaurant. She showed off the 2023 regional Emmy she had recently won for singing alongside Stevie Wonder, CeCe Peniston and 27 others who lent their voices to a song benefiting the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She still felt the pull of her Vegas singing days. But Darcus After Dark was scratching the itch for now.
“(Ollie) once told me, ‘Darcus, when you go someplace else and experience something that interests you, figure out a way to bring it home and introduce it,” she said. “That’s how I think of what we’re doing here.”
