New Kansas City bar offers giant cocktails, food, a band that can play 180 requests
Matt Kschinka is an alum of several dueling piano bars. He’s worked at Howl at the Moon in the Power & Light District, Ernie Biggs in Westport, and most recently Jack n’ Diane’s in Greenville, South Carolina.
His latest endeavor, Jukebox Heroes, is not a dueling piano bar — but it’s close, something of a cousin concept. The club opened Thursday evening inside a new space near Westport called Warehouse on Broadway, at 3951 Broadway.
“Basically, we have a very tight band that knows how to play about 180 hit songs, and they are going to be playing here every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night,” Kschinka said. “We have a jukebox on the wall, and you can go over to the jukebox, pay $10 to request a song, and the band will play it.”
Warehouse on Broadway, which is about 18,000 square feet in all, will eventually be home to two additional bars, Kschinka said. He expects to open a martini bar called Up “in about two months” and a rock ‘n’ roll-themed basement bar called Rock Bottom next spring.in spring 2024.
For now, it’s just Jukebox Heroes, which occupies the 8,000-square-foot space most recently home to Komatsu Ramen. It features two full bars, a stage, dozens of high-top tables, and capacity for nearly 400 guests.
A kitchen serves what Kschinka called “glorified bar food,” with menu items like a Nashville Hot Chicken sandwich ($13) and Fat Tire Mac and Cheese ($11). The drink menu includes “fishbowls” — large, fruity, boozy drinks like the Blue Motorboat (cherry vodka, coconut rum, blue curacao, Sprite and pineapple) for $21.
The bar is open Thursday to Sunday, 6 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. The nightly cover is $10, and the band starts playing at 8 p.m.
“We’ve tried to make sure the songs are crowd-pleasers,” Kschinka said. “At a dueling piano bar, you can kind of request anything. So if somebody requests ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton at 11:30 p.m., it brings the energy down and people will start to leave. Our band pretty much only plays what the kids these days call ‘bangers.’”
He cited “Get Low,” by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, “Party in the USA,” by Miley Cyrus, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen as a few examples.
Guests can also pay a little extra to skip the jukebox queue. A $20 request guarantees the band will play your song in the next 30 minutes; $50 in the next 15 minutes.
And though most songs will run you $10, not all hits are priced equally.
“If you want to hear ‘Freebird,’” Kschinka said, “that’s going to be $100.”
