At brunch I want savory AND sweet. This growing restaurant in KC gives the best of both
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Let’s Dish, Kansas City
Dig in: Our series showcases some of our favorite restaurant meals.
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Welcome back to our series Let’s Dish, Kansas City, showcasing some of our favorite restaurant meals.
One of the beautiful things about going out for breakfast or brunch is it’s socially acceptable, even expected, that you order dessert for your main meal.
Think about it: All those coffee cakes and pancakes and cinnamon rolls and doughnuts and waffles piled high with whipped cream are really just desserts in disguise — something you’d have to eat all your vegetables and clear your plate for at dinner before your mother would allow you one bite.
But as much as I love to cater to my sweet tooth, I was always torn when confronted with a brunch menu: Do I order something sweet or something savory? Decisions, decisions.
Until I realized: Why not order both?
I’m not talking about your standard scrambled eggs, a couple of pancakes and a strip of bacon — been there, done that. I’m talking about something elevated, the best, most creative options from both parts of the menu.
Which brings me to HomeGrown, the growing breakfast and brunch restaurant that started in Wichita and keeps expanding, for good reason, around the Kansas City metro.
Your tastes may differ, but I say the best thing on the savory side of the menu is the West Coast Wake Up omelet ($12.50), stuffed with bacon, onion, tomato and not one but two cheeses — brie and jack — with sliced avocado on top.
And then I get my brunch companion, usually my husband, to share something sweet. At HomeGrown, that has to be the Cinnamon Swirl French Toast ($10). (Their coffee cake with caramel sauce, $6, is pretty darn tasty as well.)
Take a bite of the omelet and you get fluffy eggs, strands of gooey, melted cheese, mmmm bacon, and veggies to erase any guilt. It comes with seasoned rosemary potatoes and house-made berry jam to spread on a toasted Wolferman’s English muffin.
Then switch over for a bite of the sweet stuff. The two pieces of French toast (one for each person, I say) are made from sweet house-made bread with ribbons of cinnamon — “it’s essentially a cinnamon roll in loaf form,” said Mark Androes, HomeGrown’s Kansas City market leader. It comes dusted with powdered sugar, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t drench it with warm syrup as well. Every bite brings a burst of cinnamon and sugar.
The dish comes with a cup of sliced strawberries — again, to erase any guilt.
Take a bite of omelet. Then a bite of French toast. A sip of coffee. Repeat. A perfect meal.
The West Coast Wake Up is also a favorite for Androes, but he often orders the scramble version.
“I call it a symphony of flavors,” he said.
Exactly.
HomeGrown is the brainchild of longtime Wichita restaurateur Jon Rolph, whose parents owned some Pizza Hut franchises before launching the Mexican restaurant chain Carlos O’Kelly’s in 1981. Under Rolph, the company, now called Thrive Restaurant Group, bought up a bushel of Applebee’s locations. But in 2017, Rolph and his wife, Lauren, wanted to create something more, well, homegrown, and he opened the brunch restaurant in Wichita, emphasizing locally sourced food. (You’ll see the couple on the menu, in the form of Jon’s Denver omelet and LoLo’s Granola.)
Harrison Ford eats there on his annual trips back to Wichita, where, as the Wichita Eagle reports, he has his Cessna plane worked on and meets with flight instructors for safety tips. Just this March, he ate at HomeGrown two mornings in a row. His go-to order, Androes said, is the avocado toast, which comes with two eggs and fresh fruit ($12.50).
I eat at the locations in Leawood, 11705 Roe Ave., or Brookside, 338 W. 63rd St. (where HomeGrown entered the KC market in 2021), but there’s also one in Liberty, a new one in the Power & Light District and, next year, Merriam, with more on the way, Androes said.
Each restaurant looks a little different, but all the KC area locations use locally sourced decor — tables made by Leap Hospitality in Liberty, artwork by UMKC students — as well as locally sourced food from the likes of Scavuzzo’s in KCK for meat and Rose Acre Farms near Columbia for eggs.
Especially if you’re going on a weekend, get on the online waiting list at homegrownkitchen.com before you leave home. When you arrive, you’ll probably find a line out the door.
For good reason.
This story was originally published June 11, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
