Skulls and spiders: KC fine-dining restaurant goes for ‘wow factor’ as Halloween haunt

Chris Youngers walked past a row of ravens, a chandelier made of skulls and a box of eyeballs.

“We’re literally just getting started. We’ll be here all night tonight,” the co-owner of Café Trio, 4558 Main St., said while inching past a table of bloody hands and tombstones on the first Sunday in October.

Every year, for nearly 20 years, this is Halloween decorating day for the staff of a Kansas City restaurant that — should an award for the metro’s most extravagantly, albeit tastefully, festooned eatery ever be invented — the 300-seat fine dining bistro would surely get its name etched in marble.

Ghoulish and ghostly faces extend from the walls. Spiders the size of laundry sacks hang from the ceiling near flickering electric candles. Lights in orange cast an eerie glow. Webbing like sinew is stretched from every corner, as classic black and white horror films play on a few TVs.

“I just want the wow factor,” said Tai Nguyen, 51, who is both business partner and life partner with Youngers, 50, and the creative force behind the decor. “Our guests over the last 20 years, they kind of expect to see all this when they come in during the holidays. Every year, that’s why it keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

The ravens, the skull chandelier, a miniature Halloween village reminiscent of the film “Beetlejuice,” and the bloody hands clasping candles jutting from the walls are all new this year. Outside on the back deck, overlooking Mill Creek Park east of the Country Club Plaza, more than a dozen skeletons, soon to be strung, lay out along the bar like the remains of so many corpses.

The restaurant business alone, with its tight margins and rising costs, can be scary enough. Last year, a real-life fright took hold when Nguyen, on decorating night, was struck with debilitating abdominal pain for unknown reasons — the pair think it was stress — and spent a week at the University of Kansas Hospital. “I was disappointed because I had not started the webbing,” Nguyen said.

He and Youngers and former partner Al Richey were all restaurant newbies when, in November 2003, they bought the 100-seat Papagallo’s restaurant at 3535 Broadway and, in June 2004, opened Café Trio for casual fine dining. Decorating began from the start.

Back then, they went big with every holiday: Christmas, Halloween, Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day. The first Valentine’s Day, Nguyen, a certified public accountant by trade, clipped the blooms off of hundreds of red roses and hung them at different lengths from the ceiling.

When, in 2009, they moved to the Main Street space — formerly occupied by the restaurants Venue, then Charlie’s on the Hill, then Frondizi’s — the economy had just hurdled into free fall. For Café Trio, with its sophisticated evening piano player at a baby grand, they were successful days.

“When he opened up in June of ‘09, there were no new restaurants in ‘09, or in ‘10 really,” said Youngers, who was originally in commercial construction. “We had no idea what we were doing, but we were killing it. Our liquor orders, for several months, exceeded the casinos’.”

Those heady days lasted through 2013, he said, when business evened out until, in March 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Youngers’ eyes still water at the painful memory. The lease on the business was guaranteed by his and Nguyen’s home mortgage. Restaurants began failing nationwide.

Two months later, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck. Black Lives Matter protests engulfed Mill Creek Park, with protesters and police facing off inside clouds of tear gas along the Plaza’s eastern edge. The windows of Café Trio along Main Street were smashed, then covered by plywood. For several nights in early June, they were tagged with messages of “F*** the Police,” whitewashed or painted black before they were tagged again.

“We were still in here vacuuming glass out of the banquettes,” Youngers said, “thinking that we could still somehow get open. Little did we know that that wasn’t going to happen.”

But it eventually did. The restaurant survived, reopening in early July with social distancing and all the precautions in place.

That October, the decorations were up notwithstanding. Each year, on the Saturday night before Halloween, all staff and most every customer wears a costume for a contest. They also dress up on Halloween night. Prizes, like gift cards and bottles of wine, are given away that Saturday. In 2020, the Halloween masks included COVID masks.

This year, too, servers will be costumed. Lucky Perez, 31, a server for five years, is going as Lilo with a co-worker going as Stitch from the Disney cartoon “Lilo & Stitch.” Another pair is considering going as Wayne and Garth from the old “Saturday Night Live” sketch and movie “Wayne’s World.”

The restaurant is decorated only for Halloween and Christmas now. More than two dozen full- and part-time staff pitch in, as do some die-hard customers. Leona Dekat, 75, and her husband, Joe, 76, of Independence, have been helping decorate for the holidays for nearly all of its two decades.

“This place is like home,” Leona said. “To me, Chris and Tai are like family. I have kids, but they’re like my kids.”

The couple’s devotion runs deep. In January 2017, the Dekats’ home, then in south Kansas City, burned down from an electrical fire at 3 a.m. It was Youngers and Nguyen who set up a GoFundMe site. It didn’t raise much, but it didn’t matter. The cafe owners gave the Dekatses a refuge and food, like the restaurant’s signature macaroni and cheese.

“They told us we could come in as often as we needed,” Leona said. Decorating days are marked early on their calendar.

“I call Tai at least 30 to 45 days beforehand and say, ‘OK, what day do you decorate and when are we doing it?” she said.

The lavish decorations are not for everyone, Youngers said.

“There are a few who are turned off by it,” he said. “Maybe it’s their expectation, when they walk in the door to a casual fine dining restaurant, that it won’t be decorated like this. I mean, we want everyone to have a great time. When someone leaves or isn’t happy, it’s upsetting. But it is what it is.”

Perez, the server, recalled a patron with a spider phobia who had to leave.

“You know,” Nguyen said, “it’s weird, The day of (decorating) is always extremely stressful and I say I’m never doing this again. Then, once the product is complete, and I do these little tweaks, it makes it worth it.”

For all its Halloween horror, the effect is beautiful. Then, the day after Halloween, it all comes down.

“Two weeks after that, we put up Christmas, right before Thanksgiving,” Nguyen said. “We go through the whole process again.”

Scariest thought of all, or perhaps the happiest: At Christmas, they go even bigger.