KC Confidential

It may be "all quiet" along the battle lines in the Jardine’s jazz club saga but…

The staff is gone – a couple of them fired, others told that they’d been fired. Many of KC’s top jazz musicians have joined a boycott of Jardine’s. A boycott allegedly spearheaded by Sons of Brasil trumpet player Stan Kessler, whose stepson – now former Jardine’s server – Raja called the cops on minutes before Kessler’s band showed up at the club to play, but then walked out.

No two ways about it, it’s been ugly. Not to mention confusing.

Yet while things have been relatively quiet lately in the media, that doesn’t mean there’s not been a lot going on behind the scenes among interested parties, in places TV cameras are of little use.

And that’s exactly where this story appears headed, with at least three separate buyers indicating an interest in buying the Plaza jazz club from owner Beena Raja.

Raja declined to comment for this story.

However the one-two punch of a staff walkout and musician boycott coupled with a media piling on has taken its toll. Jardine’s reopened last week for the KC Confidential holiday bash and featured acts through Saturday.

Since then its calendar has been blank.

One potential buyer is Paul Wilson of Olathe. But is he a serious buyer?

"It’s absolutely something we’ve been looking at doing since we first became aware that it was an option," Wilson says. "We’d be buying it just for the love of the place and the musicians."

At this point, there’s not much more to say than may the best man (or woman) win.

Something for everyone today, even Jardine’s haters and future Jardine’s lovers…

One of my all-time, good-for-the-earth, suburban pet peeves is taking a step towards being eliminated. Starting in January, yard waste will no longer be picked up in Johnson County and dumped in landfills. 

Hats off to the Johnson County Commission for doing the right thing.

 Starting in January, "Yard waste collected curbside will be required to be composted rather than disposed of in a landfill…" the Johnson County Sustainability Program Web site says. "The changes to the Code will require all residential trash haulers operating in Johnson County to provide specified minimum solid waste services to their residential customers to divert more recyclable and compostable materials away from landfills to beneficial reuse."

Why should you care?

Because bagging grass and leaves is pointless and wasteful. Mulching with a lawnmower is not only better for your lawn, but it saves fuel guzzling trash trucks from having to lumber around town to pick everything up and dump it in landfills that are filling up fast.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s what the Grounds Maintenance, a site for "golf and green industry professionals" says: "The easiest and cheapest way to dispose of leaves is to mulch them into the turf. This is not a new idea, but universities have only recently compiled enough data to determine that tree-leaf mulching has no long-term negative effects on the turf. Studies at Michigan State, Cornell, Rutgers and Purdue have concluded that mulching tree leaves is an excellent disposal method that does not harm healthy turf."

The new JOCO ordinance requires trash haulers to offer composting services (for an upcharge) to Johnson Countians who persist in bagging clippings and leaves, which the county (and I) hope will result in more mulching and less needless trash disposal.

Huzzah!

H&M on the Plaza

It’s been a while since there was this much advance buzz on a retail store opening…

The countdown and excitement over clothing store H&M was huge. Including my 14 year-old daughters who had the esteemed pleasure of checking out H&M in Tucson last summer. And make no mistake, H&M has been packed since its recent pre-holiday opening.

So down I went, fashion conscious teens in tow to get a first hand read on the place. To my surprise, here’s what I got; disappointment.

"Forever 21 is for younger people," says daughter Savannah. "You can shop at H&M if you’re older. It’s cheaper than Urban Outfitters but it’s not as hip as Urban Outfitters,"

So what’s missing?

"I just don’t like the clothes they have right now. They had more stuff that I liked in Tucson last summer."

The KC Star’s new ‘913’ weekly magazine

Eat your hearts out Missourians…

New Star Wednesday insert 913 is clearly targeted to replace the dearly departed Johnson County Sun.

And so far, so good.

For the past two weeks 913 weighed in at 36 and 32 pages in length. Nearly as large as what’s left of the Pitch.

However, the similarity ends there. There’s not a hip bone in 913’s body with the possible exception of Steve Rose – who finally has a current pic of himself and he’s looking pretty good. No way Rose is used to the type of editorial scrutiny that’s mandated at the Star, but when he wants to get pissy and take somebody or something down, he knows how to play the game. Here’s hoping the Star lets him.

The Star is throwing just about everything but the kitchen sink into the mix and it appears to be a content / news improvement over what was left of the Sun the past few years as it slipped toward oblivion. It’s even got Joyce Smith from the business section. Which could be a good thing if she can come up with enough content apart from her business section columns. She had a bunch of good stuff in the first 913, but today’s column is content light with nothing more than a filler, puff piece on a Leawood nut shop. A Leawood nut shop? Yep.

Anne Brockhoff’s new dining column could be a winner, but the Star is pretty goosey about letting people other than the designated reviewer assign a ratings number. So you have to plow through the column and then guess to what extent she liked it. It’s a great concept, but the newspaper needs to entrust her to make that call, otherwise many readers may find it skipable.

The main feature news content is a little PC for Johnson Countians. And a lot devoid of much news (unlike the Sun).

Week Two’s "Breaking Free, Unshackling from the chains of hyper-parenting," for example.  And then today’s, "We’re Diverse. Really! How a 100 percent increase in our black, Hispanic and Asian residents is reflected in our schools, institutions and neighborhoods."

I’ve been living in Johnson County for more than 20 years now, and I can tell you those are not the must read kind of stories locals are looking for. Let alone thirsting for. The Star needs to figure a way to get some real news into 913 if it wants to be much more than an ad rag.

The $64 million question: Can the Star think outside its "normal" news box enough to truly matter to suburban Johnson Countians who still lump the Plaza in with downtown and consider KC’s crown jewel too dangerous to let their teenage kids roam free?  Even by day?

We’ll see.

Amidst the back-and-forth tales of Jardine’s firing its entire staff lies a single, glaring contradiction…

The local news media – including this site – bought into and reported that owner Beena Raja had fired the Plaza jazz club’s entire staff. That fifteen people had been unceremoniously turned out on the streets right ahead of the holidays.

Nevermind that none of that had been confirmed with Jardine’s. Or later, when Raja was finally cornered she denied it, saying the general manager/cook had resigned, two staffers had been fired and another walked out.  Not surprisingly a local waiter blogger championed the staff firing story without even attempting to contact Raja.

Worse yet, a local TV news organization that has lead much of the news charge on Jardine’s woes employs a reporter who’s daughter worked at Jardine’s and is alleged to have been among the three servers Raja found drinking for free at 4 a.m. Thanksgiving morning.

None of the stories I’ve seen disclosed that potential conflict to viewers.

Now let’s get to the heart of the matter.

Was the entire staff fired or is it possible, as Raja maintains, that a handful of disgruntled staffers who quit or were fired told the remaining staff not to show up at the club because everybody had been fired?

Enter concerned Raytown mom Deidra Foley Sexton whose son has worked at Jardine’s for the past year and a half, earning his way through college. Against her better judgement – but in the interest of fair play – Sexton agreed to tell the other side of the story.

Did her son get fired by Raja?

"No he did not," Sexton says. "He never got a phone call saying he was fired. His friends from work called him and said everybody was just fired, so he assumed that he was fired."

Sexton says she’s familiar with Raja’s partying rep, but has no knowledge of her alleged outbursts of temper.

"I think she’s shown a lot of kindness until this situation," Sexton says. "My son’s worked there a year and a half and I’ve never heard him say she was a terrible boss.

"I feel so sorry for her. When this first started I didn’t understand what had happened and I was just so angry at Beena, like how could she do that? And now that I understand more about it, I just feel so sorry for her."