KC burger joint survived a serial killer, Hooters and COVID. Now, it serves 5,000 kids

For those who make it in the precarious restaurant business there are stories of surviving and stories of thriving.

If the place is the Westport Flea Market Bar & Grill — in business for 33 years, its air redolent with fried oil, its fist-sized burgers routinely voted among the best in Kansas City — there’s both.

In 1988, the Flea Market kept going even after, on a strange Saturday morning in April, a 22-year-old man with a dog collar around his throat was found running naked along Charlotte Street, having escaped from a house where he was held and tortured over five days.

The world would come to know his abuser as Kansas City serial killer Bob Berdella, whose curio shop, Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre, shared space indoors at the Westport Flea Market at 817 Westport Road.

“In the front room. I remember going there,” said Joe Zwillenberg who 18 years later, in 2006, became the Flea Market’s second owner. Berdella, believed to have killed at least six victims, died in prison in 1992.

In 2006, the Flea Market faced the wrecking ball and a new future as a Hooters until, at the last moment, a young Zwillenberg, then 35, and owner of Joe Joe’s Italian Eatery on Main Street, saved the day, skirting past Hooters and becoming a Westport hero when he bought the place from owner, Mel Kleb.

“I want to carry on the tradition,” Zwillenberg said at the time.

Then, of course, there was COVID.

Not only has the Flea Market survived, but since about 2010 — and particularly over the last four years — it has thrived due to a massive part of the business (now making up 70% of yearly revenue) that Zwillenberg is certain most of his patrons have no clue exists:

Kids.

Westport Flea Market meals

“Hey, Kurt,” Zwillenberg called across the kitchen to chef Kurt Browning, “have you cut that lasagna yet?”

Zwillenberg turned to a visitor.

“Gordon Parks is getting lasagna today,” he said of the charter school.

That’s the business: 9,000 meals a day being prepared long before the doors to the Flea Market open — first 4,000 breakfasts, then 5,000 lunches served each day at 14 charter schools. Among them: Gordon Parks, Académie Lafayette, Lee A. Tolbert, Kansas City International Academy, Allen Village School, Citizens of the World, Scuola Vita Nuova, KIPP Endeavor Elementary School, KIPP Legacy High School, The Jewish Community Center, KVC Missouri Academy (formerly Great Circle), the Sherwood Autism Center.

At the Flea Market bar and grill, Mike Hill, an employee for 27 years, has a small crew and manages the grill alone. It’s a tight rectangle of a space, hardly enough to fit a Buick.

But west of the kitchen wall, once occupied by the actual flea market part of the Westport Flea Market is the catering kitchen: 8,000 square feet, 11 industrial ovens, 14 stacks of warmers and a continuously moving hive of 22 employees who start at 4:30 every morning — cooks, food prep workers including 10 “captains” working as liaisons to each school.

Outside, before the sun rises, the Flea Market’s fleet of 14 catering vans (one dedicated to each school) line up behind the market’s signature burgermobile, a GMC truck made to look like a hamburger. A decade ago, Zwillenberg intentionally visited the USS Yorktown, the aircraft carrier docked in Charleston, South Carolina, to see its kitchen.

“I could see where we were going,” Zwillenberg said, in terms of growing the school business. “‘I’m like, ‘Well, they feed 5,000 people breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. I literally modeled the working of our kitchen after an aircraft carrier …

“The vans line up. I go back to the aircraft carrier. We’re shooting off the planes with loaded payload.”

While Browning, the chef, made garlic bread and kept an eye on pans of lasagna, another team plated 120 burgers and scooped potato salad into Styrofoam containers, their white lids tilted open across a stainless steel table. Salads were prepared for the salad bar. Spicy chicken patties and garlic green beans were being cooked for other schools.

The Flea Market prepares three different breakfasts and three different lunches every day. Schools are put in groups. On any given day, one set of schools may get Mexican among multiple choices, the second may get barbecue, and the third Italian. Breakfasts might be eggs, pancakes, French toast, sausage biscuits, bagels, or fruit — among 20 choices.

“You can’t feed everybody hamburgers every day,” Zwillenberg said.

A point of pride: The food is fresh, local, non-corporate. Meats come from the Fareway Meat Market & McGonigle’s KC BBQ off Ward Parkway. Twice a month, kids get pizzas through a partnership with Waldo Pizza. Every hamburger the kids get is a Flea Market burger.

“That’s a handmade burger cooked this morning,” he said.

Joe Joe’s Catering

Technically, the restaurant’s catering arm is its own entity, Joe Joe’s Catering, with some recipes dating to Zwillenberg’s Joe Joe’s Italian Eatery days. The first school he catered, in 1999, was part of the Jobs Corps program. When he took over the Flea Market in 2006, he began adding more. The business has been growing ever since.

“It’s been such a great switch,” said Jessica DiGiovanni, the principal at Scuola Vita Nuova, a kindergarten-to-eighth-grade charter school in the Northeast area of Kansas City. Last year, the school had a different food service.

At 11:30 a.m. DiGiovanni stood in the cafeteria, watching as a lunchtime group, accounting for about one-third of her nearly 400 students, dug into their Flea Market burgers, potato salad, fruit cocktail, chips, milk and salad.

“Delicious,” 10-year-old Zach Ibrahim said, and his fifth grade buddy, Camilo Arce, agreed.

“It’s hard to feed a school,” DiGiovanni said. “You can tell if kids aren’t happy. The food gets thrown in the trash.”

That’s not happening these days, she said.

“We’re getting a lot of positive comments.”

Zwillenberg has brought on a new school each year for the last four years. He’s looking to add another. When he does, the plan is to expand another 3,000 square feet, breaking through the wall to the empty building he owns next door at 827 Westport Road. Most recently it was a bubble tea shop. It was a Normal Human shop before that, and Spivey’s Rare Books further back.

“We’re going to turn this into a catering kitchen as soon as we get a new account,” Zwillenberg said.

Even though school catering brings in the majority of his revenue, Zwillenberg concedes that it’s not easy money. It’s a volume business. The profit margin is taco shell thin.

“I mean, I’m a capitalist, “ he said. “I don’t want to lose money. … If I make a quarter per kid,” meaning 25 cents per meal, he said, “that’s a win. That’s big.”

Often, it’s not that much. On some meals, he makes next to nothing. Others, a bit more. It works out.

“That’s why you have to specialize in this,” Zwillenberg said. “You can’t just start a business and say, ‘I want to cater to schools.’ It won’t work.

“It’s too labor intensive. I mean, if I didn’t have the staff that I have, that cares this much. If I didn’t have the partners I have with Fareway Meats, Waldo Pizza giving me the absolute best pricing possible, this doesn’t happen. It’s just too expensive.

“But it’s a local thing. My partners know what I’m doing. We’re feeding kids. … It’s a way of giving back that’s just unbelievable. To see these kids — who, I would say for 65%, this is the main meal of their whole day — I’m giving them something that I know they’re going to eat and they’re going to enjoy.

“What do I get out of it? Honestly, at the end of the day, I hate to tell you, we’re all going to go someday. If I can provide something that these kids can have, and they’re better in the classroom? They’re better, happier …?”

Feeds the soul, Zwillenberg said. That’s reason enough.