Dinner in the boxcars, cocktails in the caboose: Remember KC’s train car restaurants?
Suzanne Conway’s ideal date night in the early ‘80s undoubtedly involved the prime rib at Victoria Station.
When recalling her memories of the long-gone restaurant to The Star one recent afternoon, each point circled back to the same sentiment:
“But the food was really, really wonderful.”
The tantalizing beef cuts prompted Conway to suggest the Victoria Station in The Star’s callout for historic restaurants.
Entrees aside, the atmosphere was perhaps just as big of a draw for customers.
“When the original Victoria Station was built, the owners wanted to make it unusual and eye-catching enough to make customers walk through the door for the first time,” one Star writer chronicled in 1976.
Victoria Station was made up of a series of bright red boxcars parked end-to-end. One sat in the busy River Quay district near 3rd and Delaware streets from 1973 to 1985, another opened later at 103rd Street and Wornall Road. Cabooses tacked on the back of the restaurants sold Old Fashioneds, Grasshoppers and other cocktails.
British railroad tickets and schedules overlaid in plastic covered the tables. Station signs, potbelly stoves and head lamps originally from British and Australian railways. Baggage carts doubled as tables for salad bar toppings.
The train-themed restaurant’s promise of a one-of-a-kind experience had caught on quickly: Started in San Francisco, the company opened dozens of restaurants around the country in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And rail hub Kansas City seemed like a natural choice.
‘Very, very Victorian’
The restaurant’s name is a nod to the Victoria Station in London, built in the 1860s as a railway hub.
An article published in The Star in 1972 ahead of the first Kansas City spot’s opening said the ownership group had made frequent trips to England to collect authentic memorabilia for the restaurants.
Conway recalled the feeling of stepping into the vintage train cars.
“Very plush wallpaper, lots of wood and burgundies and gold,” she said. “It was very, very Victorian (Era) in its look.”
About 220 customers could fit inside the River Quay (known as the River Market today) restaurant and feast on steak, shrimp, or a build-your-own salad bar, sipping on a wide selection of California wine.
The menu, presented to customers on a small wooden board, also included sauteed mushrooms and baked potatoes, with dessert options like Bavarian cream chocolate pie.
In the restaurant’s heyday, Conway, now 77, remembered the place as a popular hangout spot for young people.
“It was a young people, up-and-coming-type place,” she said.
The Associated Press noted in 1974 that the concept was a hit, grossing $25 million in sales at the time.
Of the nearly 40 restaurants at the time — which included spots in Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Dallas and Los Angeles — Kansas City’s in the River Quay was the second largest.
In a few more years, the company’s footprint would balloon to about 90 restaurants total.
Downfall of the Victoria Station restaurants
But the River Quay mafia wars, which resulted in the explosion of two taverns nearby in 1977, cast a long shadow on the train-themed restaurant nearby. Though it stayed open for several more years, a manager told The Star when it closed in 1985 that it was, “something that Victoria Station should have done years ago.”
“We stuck it out, but it’s not feasible to be located in that area right now,” he said. “Nobody could stay alive down there.”
The Wornall Road location stayed open for about a year longer, but Victoria Station restaurants across the country were struggling.
More began to close, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1986, blaming “a bad recession in the restaurant business.”
The last Victoria Station restaurant closed in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2017, though that restaurant was not located in boxcars.
While the Victoria Station boxcars and caboose are no longer sit on 3rd and Delaware, a similar concept exists a few blocks south.
The Donutology trolley at 426 Delaware St. offers coffee and doughnuts from a vintage 1940s street car. It has a few tables for patrons to sit inside.
No prime rib on the menu, though.