Married chef duo from Wichita taking over restaurant inside historic Kansas hotel

A husband-and-wife chef duo from Wichita will be the new operators of the upscale restaurant inside the historic Elgin Hotel in Marion.

Luis and Alicia Pena, who until recently were leading the hospitality program at Butler Community College’s Redler Institute of the Culinary Arts, have decided that they’ll reopen the restaurant, which first was added to the hotel in 2019.

Until May, the restaurant was operated by Kari Newell, the woman at the center of the ongoing Marion newspaper raid controversy. Newell, who took over the restaurant in 2023, was out by May of this year.

Butler announced in March that it was parting ways with the Penas, who had helped lead the culinary arts program for three and a half years —Luis as the director of the culinary and hospitality program and Alicia as a faculty member. At the time, Luis said that the couple was hoping to open their own food business.

“We stepped in and decided to take it on,” Pena said of the hotel restaurant. “We’re going for a destination restaurant.”

The two plan to keep the name the restaurant has been operating under — Parlour 1886 — and they plan to reopen it in late August, Luis said.

Though the dining room, which features woodwork, leather chairs and dramatic chandeliers, doesn’t need much work, the Penas plan to make the menu their own. They’ll serve locally sourced steaks, burgers, pasta and chicken dishes plus old-fashioned cocktails from a full bar. They’ll also serve breakfast — mostly for the hotel guests — though anyone is welcome to dine at the restaurant.

“We’re not doing formal fine dining, but it’s an upscale experience that we’re trying to provide,” Luis said.

When the Penas left Butler, he said, they initially thought they’d open their own bakery. But then they were introduced to Tammy Ensey and her husband, Jeremy, who bought the Elgin Hotel in 2016.

The couples realized they had a lot in common and shared a vision for the restaurant.

“This came up, and I was like, ‘Oh, this really speaks to my heart because we want to do something that is nice and refined,’” Luis said.

The couple is hoping that the restaurant will attract not only local diners and people vacationing at Marion Reservoir but also people from Wichita and Kansas City who are looking for an escape.

The Elgin Hotel originally opened in 1886 with three stories and 42 sleeping rooms. It operated as a hotel until the 1960s then was abandoned and threatened with demolition.

In the 1980s, it was converted into apartments and put on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2006, Jim and Nancy Cloutier invested $1.9 million to renovate the building, living on the third floor and running it as a bed and breakfast. The Enseys bought it in 2016, and quickly realized that, without any fine dining options nearby for their guests to enjoy, they’d need to provide it. They opened the restaurant in 2019 but started looking for someone else to run it during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Newell ran not only the restaurant but also the coffee shop across the street, which operated out of a Queen Anne Victorian home. Newell, who called the business Kari’s Kitchen, lived on the upper level of the coffee shop.

That business closed in January, Tammy Ensey said, and her mother — who owned the Queen Anne home — sold it. The new owner is planning to reopen it as a coffee shop called The Sit Down within the next month.

Ensey said that the decision to part ways with Newell was mutual.

“Time had proven that it wasn’t going to be in both of our best interests to continue how we were,” Ensey said.

She said she’s excited to have found such an experienced duo to run the restaurant. Before coming to Wichita, Luis and Alicia both worked in east coast restaurants. They ended up in Wichita after Alicia was reassigned to Wichita’s McConnell Air Force Base.

Both of the Penas are culinary school graduates, and for a while they were running their own home-based bakery called Pinch of Grace Sweets.

“I’m over the moon,” Ensey said. “I can’t wait. I love the Penas already, and I loved seeing what they’d done at the Redler Institute. I think it’s going to be a really great partnership and is really going to bring something new to Marion and to The Elgin that we haven’t seen in the past.”

Newell called the restaurant inside the hotel Chef’s Plate at Parlour 1886 when she ran it. Her complaint last summer about the Marion newspaper — which she said violated her privacy when it obtained public records related to a past DUI on her record — triggered a police raid that captured national headlines.

At the time, Newell was trying to obtain a liquor license for the Elgin Hotel restaurant.

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