The least romantic places to take a date in KC
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👋🏼Abbey here. Kansas City has enough rooftop restaurants, steakhouses and cocktail bars with low lighting to convince anyone they're in love. Try taking them somewhere mildly miserable instead to see if the love is real!
💩 A picnic outside a Wastewater Treatment Plant
You drive to the West Bottoms, lay out the blanket and unpack the charcuterie while pretending the industrial backdrop resembles intentional brutalist architecture.
- The breeze shifts, you lock eyes and wonder who will make the first poop joke.
🛒 Trader Joe's off Ward Parkway on a Sunday
The parking lot alone will test you. Inside, the carts are large and people lose their sense of spatial awareness.
- If you can debate which $6 wine you both want without turning on each other, that could be your person.
🌬️Liberty Memorial Tower on a windy winter day
The skyline looks incredible. You do not. The wind comes at you sideways, whipping your hair in your face and making you look like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.
- If your date doesn't laugh when your voice cracks mid-gust, that's intimacy.
🏗️ Stroll through the Riverfront's active construction zones
You start with, "Let's walk by the water," and end up with a forklift following closely behind you, loudly beeping, waiting for you and your date to get off the path.
- It's scenic, in a sense. It's also loud enough that you can ignore any question you don't want to answer.
The bottom line: Kansas City can absolutely deliver romance on a silver platter. Sometimes it is more interesting to see what happens when it does not.