KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Two local and popular eateries, Vested Coffee and Tribe Street Kitchen, in Kansas City, Missouri, closed their doors right before the holidays.
Vested Coffee in the Garment District served its last cup of coffee on Dec. 23 and Tribe Street Kitchen in the River Market permanently closed on Dec. 22.
Customers of Vested Coffee say they will miss the "neighborhood feel" of the shop the most.
"Sad, so sad," said Jacob Keffer, who has been a Vested Coffee customer since he moved to Kansas City four years ago. "It was a Kansas City staple, and definitely a good spot for me, moving to Kansas City and coming to this coffee shop and having the owner, Susan, making an effort to know your name, as she does everybody's name, it was special. So, definitely sad to see it go."
In a farewell letter to customers, Vested Coffee said it was a "gift" and "privilege" to serve Kansas City for the past five years.
"At our Garment District location, it was time to negotiate the next five-year lease option. After months of discussion, we could not agree on terms that made it financially viable for Vested's future. Our Beacon Hill location cannot sustain the business to make a relocation an option. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to close both Vested locations," the farewell letter said.
Vested Coffee owner and CEO Susan Dees recalled five years of memories, including proposals, first dates, first birthdays and customers calling her their "adoptive parent."
"At our age, there are so many young people that live down here," Dees said. "They've got their first jobs, we've had first dates and I've seen — over the course of just this week — couples that have had their first date with us, they got married and now they have two kids within five years. We've celebrated someone — we haven't seen her in six months — and she wanted to come on our last day, beautiful, beautiful woman, stage-four cancer and she wanted to tell me she's cancer free today. So, there's been tears."
Dees said customers lined up out the door all week long to say goodbye to the beloved coffee shop.
"We served coffee well, but we loved people even better," she said. "We just wanted to create community, and everybody that has talked with us this last week has just told us and confirmed that we did something different than any other coffee shop, and it's just because we wanted to love people well."
Just to the north of Vested Coffee, another beloved restaurant, Tribe Street Kitchen, closed its doors on Friday.
Tribe Street Kitchen offered customers a menu inspired by dishes from around the world for six years, according to its Instagram.
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