New owners carried longtime Kansas City cafe through the pandemic. Now it’s for sale

A year ago, new owners took over Waldo mainstay The Classic Cookie & Cafe, saying they had plans to take it through the pandemic and beyond.

Now a “for sale” sign is on the window.

“We were saving it from going under last year at this time,” partner Bob Rosson said on Monday. “Now we have it stable and we are ready to move on. We didn’t intend to do it for the long term.”

Rosson, who owns the cafe at 409 W. Gregory Blvd. with Waldo resident Ellen Klem, says it is busy with breakfast and lunch customers on the weekends and with cookie sales through the week.

But for now it is temporarily closed as they look for a new owner.

Klem said she would rather keep running the place.

“(Bob) made it possible for us to go in,” Klem said Tuesday. “I went out of town and he put it up for sale. He’s 51% owner so he gets to make those decisions without me. I’m waiting to hear back from him. I don’t want it to close. I have four kids and a full-time job. All the work I’ve put into it, I do it because I love the place.”

The Classic Cookie signed a lease on the Country Club Plaza in late 1981 and soon began selling five cookie flavors fresh from the oven, such as snickerdoodles, chocolate chocolate chips, oatmeal raisin chip and chocolate peanut butter chip.

In 1988, the Plaza location and one downtown were sold to Mrs. Fields Cookies, and The Classic Cookie relocated to its current Waldo location later that year. Leslie Stockard owned it since 1998 before selling it to the current owners.

Klem ate there with her parents, babysat the owners’ children and later became a neighbor, moving next door to the restaurant with only an alley separating them. She had longed to own the cafe.

She said sales were recently up to about 75% pre-pandemic levels, but dropped when the mask mandates went into effect on Aug. 2. The mandates were recently extended to Oct. 7.

“The numbers are difficult,” Rosson said. “Every month is different.”