Downtown KC cafe closes for good: ‘You don’t have that much runway to sit idle’

Chris Goode picked downtown for one of his Ruby Jean’s Juicery cafes just because it was densely populated with office workers.

To get the word out, he would fill a backpack with hundreds of flyers advertising the restaurant and trudge through surrounding garages to slip the leaflets under windshield wipers. He held pop-up events and catered corporate lunches, slowly building a loyal clientele over the past three years.

Then the pandemic hit.

The downtown location, in the Town Pavilion at 1111 Main St., Suite 165, shut down temporarily during the shelter-in-place order in mid-March and hasn’t reopened. Now Goode said it is closed permanently.

“We live and die down there by the corporate consumer. But a lot of companies are keeping their workers out indefinitely or changing their models and won’t bring back all of their employees,” he said.

Goode originally opened Ruby Jean’s Juicery near Westport in mid-2015, naming it after his late grandmother. Ruby Jean would gather her family and friends together over soul food. But Goode said the diet — with its high amounts of sodium and sugar — led to her early death. He wanted to offer healthier options from smoothies to bowls.

He later closed that cafe and expanded in other area markets.

The location at 3000 Troost Ave. is open for limited hours, mostly because he can’t find enough kitchen workers.

His location in the Whole Foods Market by the University of Missouri-Kansas City also is temporarily closed. He said most Whole Foods shoppers seem to want to get in and out quickly and he doesn’t want to interrupt the flow by having his customers waiting on their orders. But he hopes to reopen there soon.

The downtown location opened in July 2017 serving breakfast and lunch items such as smoothies, protein bowls and veggie wraps. But Goode said he expected it to lose money if it reopened during the pandemic.

“You don’t have that much runway to sit idle,” he said. “You are so proud of it. So it’s hard, really, really hard. But I’m also really grateful that we have the other locations and still have opportunities.”