Of Course Kitchen & Company

Where Overland Park's Everyday Dining Gets Serious

West 159th Street runs through the part of Overland Park that most visitors skip on their way to the Country Club Plaza or the Power & Light District in Kansas City proper. Of Course Kitchen & Company sits on that corridor, at 7753 W 159th St, in a part of the Kansas City metro where the dining options have expanded well beyond the barbecue-and-chain baseline the region carried for decades.

Overland Park's restaurant scene has shifted meaningfully over the past ten to fifteen years. The city's southern zip codes, once defined almost entirely by big-box retail and chain restaurants, now support a mix of independently operated concepts that draw from across the culinary spectrum. Of Course Kitchen & Company fits inside that pattern, positioned in a neighborhood that now includes spots like KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot, Hot Basil, and Hummus and Pita, each representing a different wave of the suburb's growing appetite for food with a specific cultural point of view.

The Cultural Weight of the American Kitchen-and-Company Format

The "Kitchen & Company" naming convention carries specific cultural baggage in American dining. It signals a certain kind of ambition: the restaurant as community anchor, the kitchen as the social center, the "company" framing suggesting that gathering around food is the primary purpose rather than the food itself being a destination object. This is a distinctly American interpretation of hospitality, one with roots in the tavern and boarding-house traditions of the nineteenth century, updated for a contemporary suburban context. It positions the dining experience somewhere between the tightly choreographed formality of destination restaurants and the purely transactional efficiency of fast casual.

Of Course Kitchen & Company is not competing with the tasting-menu operations that define American fine dining at its most ambitious tier, the kind of programs represented by Alinea in Chicago or The French Laundry in Napa, or the farm-to-table precision of Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown. Nor does it sit in the seafood-focused fine dining category occupied by Le Bernardin in New York City or Providence in Los Angeles. The Kitchen & Company format explicitly opts out of that register, choosing instead the neighborhood-anchor role that American diners increasingly value as the pendulum swings back from maximalist dining theater.

Overland Park's Broader Dining Context

Understanding Of Course Kitchen & Company requires understanding where Overland Park sits in the Kansas City metro's culinary geography. The city is not Kansas City's dining headline, that role belongs to the Missouri side, with its barbecue institutions and the growing chef-driven restaurant scene around midtown and the Crossroads district. But Overland Park has its own distinct dining character, anchored partly by the deep-rooted barbecue tradition that institutions like Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue represent, and increasingly supplemented by the kind of independent operators who read the suburb's income demographics and bet on a more curious local appetite.

That context places concepts like Of Course Kitchen & Company in a cohort of independent Overland Park restaurants that serve a dual function: they give locals a credible reason to stay on the Kansas side rather than crossing the state line for dinner, and they contribute to the suburb's gradual repositioning from purely residential-service dining to something with actual culinary identity. The Mediterranean Taste concept nearby reflects the same dynamic from a different culinary angle.

How It Compares to the American Kitchen Format at Scale

The American dining tradition that Of Course Kitchen & Company draws from has produced some of the country's most influential restaurants. At the chef-driven end, that tradition runs through places like Emeril's in New Orleans and the community-centered dining model of Lazy Bear in San Francisco. At the highest precision tier, Addison in San Diego and The Inn at Little Washington show the tradition at its most exacting. Programs like Atomix in New York City and 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong show how global and Korean-American culinary traditions operate at the destination end of the spectrum.

Of Course Kitchen & Company occupies a different tier, the neighborhood end of that same tradition, where the metric is not Michelin recognition but consistent local trust. That is a legitimate and distinct form of culinary value, and one that Overland Park's growing independent dining scene is increasingly capable of sustaining.

Planning Your Visit

Of Course Kitchen & Company is located at 7753 W 159th St in Overland Park, in the southern corridor of the suburb off Antioch Road. The address places it in a retail strip context typical of the area, accessible by car with standard suburban parking. The restaurant is open Tuesday through Thursday from 5 to 9 PM, Friday and Saturday from 5 to 10 PM, and is closed Monday and Sunday. Reservations are recommended. Expect about $60 per person.