Kansas City This Weekend: Vinyl, Jazz, and a Trumpet Summit

Last Sunday, Prime Social and Beluga threw National Vodka Day sixteen floors above the Plaza, and it did not disappoint. Three make-and-shake cocktails, small plates, and a table full of new friends. Mad love to Nikola and Maddy, our host-bartenders. We shut it down. 10/10, would do again.

I also made it out to the new Bad Cat Jazz Bar in South KC to catch the Marcus Lewis Quartet put in work. The room is new and cozy. If you haven't been, Saturday's your shot: Chris Hazelton's organ at five, Adam Larson at seven.

But I'm looking forward to this weekend: VOO on Vinyl. Saturday at 8, DJs Skeem and K-Flex spin records in VOO's moody little lounge in Baltimore. That's my Saturday. Pull up. Bring your ears.

I'll see you at the bar ☾

-Jay, SecretKC Editor

Not everything we write is about this weekend. The Guides are SecretKC's evergreen side: the bars, rooms, and rituals that hold up any night of the year. They live on the site, not in your inbox, so here's where to find them.

The Best Hotel Lobby Bars in Kansas City
Bar Stilwell made this week's list for a reason. Here's where the rest of the city's best hotel pours are hiding.
→ Read the guide

Where Kansas City Goes After 10 PM: SecretKC's Year One
Dinners done, but the night is young. Here’s your playbook to what’s next!
→ Read the guide

All SecretKC Guides →

Vodka was sold to America as the drink that tastes like nothing. In 1939 a man named John Martin bought a struggling little Connecticut distillery called Smirnoff for $14,000. Nobody here wanted it. Americans drank whiskey. Gin, if they were feeling fancy. So Heublein sold it as "white whiskey." No color. No smell. No taste. Not a spirit to sip, a spirit to add stuff to.

The blank canvas found its first big hit far from home. During the war, Americans stationed in Turkey were mixing neutral spirits into orange juice. By 1943 the drink had a name in Ankara. In 1949, Time found it at the bar of Istanbul's Park Hotel, where Turkish intelligence agents drank alongside American engineers and Balkan refugees. Their drink was "the latest Yankee concoction of vodka and orange juice, called a 'screwdriver.'" —or so the internet says… The story everyone tells is that oil men out in the Gulf had no barspoon, so they stirred it with the nearest tool on the rig. Folk tales, the lot of ‘em. Then the Moscow Mule came out of Los Angeles in the forties, with ginger beer, lime, and a copper mug. By 1968 vodka was the number two spirit in the country. By 1976 it was number one.

But Scotch is where it’s at for me!

—Stay Sharp KC, 🍸

The Monarch Bar — Serious cocktails, serious energy.
→ The Monarch Bar

Ted's Taproom — Downtown on McGee, elegant but approachable, with live sets Tuesday through Sunday and a reverse happy hour.
→ Ted's Taproom

Prime Social — The rooftop sixteen floors over the Plaza. Fire pit, skyline, and a weekend happy hour from 3 to 5.
→ Prime Social Rooftop

P.S. Speakeasy — The old mail-sorting room in the Hotel Phillips basement. Reservations run about a month out.
→ P.S. Speakeasy

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