Food Critics: Best Kansas City dining experiences that survived the pandemic

The pandemic forced some Kansas City restaurants to close, but many are still open, serving the dishes that keep diners coming back. Here are a few of our favorites.

While the pandemic forced plenty of painful disruptions in the restaurant industry, it also inspired a lot of chefs and bartenders to try out new concepts. Some good news is that fans have turned some of those pop-ups into permanent fixtures.

Chef Jacob Kruger opened CosmoBurger as a pop-up burger stand inside Waldo’s Dodson’s Commons and is now preparing to open a second location in Lenexa Public Market.

“You’ll think, ‘I can get a good burger anywhere,’” says food critic Liz Cook. “You can get a better one here.”