Antler Room - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Restaurant Review

Antler Room

review by doug-frost-ms-mw • June 23, 2017

photo by Paul Ingold

Talented chefs all too frequently leave Kansas City; increasingly, they return home soon thereafter. Nick and Leslie Goellner hit the culinary trail, working in New York, San Francisco and even Copenhagen, at Noma. They came home last fall, opening the Antler Room in an area of town called Hospital Hill, a neighborhood notable these days for small, clever restaurants like Succotash and You Say Tomato, and only a few blocks from the bar bustle of Martini Corner. Given its name (an ode to a long-gone KC restaurant), the menu is surprisingly light on meats. A dish like onion-ash tajarin with basil and parmesan, or the parsnip-chestnut raviolini with apple, bacon and parsnip chips, epitomizes the eclectic menu. The wine list travels the globe, from Spanish godello to Valle d’Aosta’s Blanc de Morgex to Sicilian reds and bubbles. It’s strikingly short on American wines, but with multiple trousseaus, tempranillos, Burgundies and Piedmontese pours, it shows off the adventurous side of the couple that created it.

2506 Holmes St., Kansas City, Missouri

New American

816-605-1967

theantlerroomkc.com

This story appears in the print issue of June 2017.
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TAGS Kansas City Missouri New American Restaurant

David Paradela
Associate Editor

David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

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Tastings Editor

Corey Warren moved to New York in 2015—fifteen years too late to join The Strokes—after earning a degree at Cornell in Comparative Literature. He started polishing glasses at Betony and threw himself into the restaurant world. Later, while a captain at Aquavit, he began working part time in the Wine & Spirits tasting department. Now, in addition to running tastings, he serves as critic for the wines of the Loire, Southern France, Argentina and South Africa. Corey likes almost anything bubbly, from Miller High Life, the Champagne of beers, to Champagne, the Champagne of Champagne, but he’ll drink anything once, and loves finding unique wines.

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Patricio Tapia
Senior Correspondent

After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.