P.S. Speakeasy — Restaurant in Kansas City

The service and hassle to get a drink here was exhausting, and the payoff isn’t especially worth it. It’s just fine, but there are plenty of other bars to try in the city that’ll give you a better experience.

They heavily recommend reservations, and so we made one, but we wound up having to wait about 45 minutes past our reservation time before a table was available because they had to “kick some people out”. The hotel had the poor front desk employee doing triple duty as both the receptionist for the hotel, the host for this bar, and coordinating the valet, which certainly appeared to contribute to the slow down.

Your mileage may vary on the speakeasy atmosphere. The “hidden door” is right next to the bright and busy front desk, which doesn’t lend much of an air of a hidden and illicit establishment of old. The space is pretty modern looking in general and doesn’t really make one think of historic KC, plus their music playlist was either silent at times or very loud. Funnily enough, it sounded very much like wedding music, with plenty of classic 60s-70s love ballads and pop songs. Nothing objectively wrong with that, but just funny in the context of enjoying a prohibition-era speakeasy while Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” is blasting on the sound system.

Compare that mental image to Swordfish Tom’s, where you enter through a quiet alleyway and walk through multiple stairs and doors before reaching the bar, and inside is full of the beautiful old brick walls and a historic-looking engine and old-timey decor, lush and interesting seating areas, and just enough background noise for privacy without the need to shout at one another.

Once we got inside, there were plenty of open tables, which was frustrating to see after being made to wait so long owing to table availability. Service was polite but slow, and it took a lot of time both to order and have our drinks served. It looked like there was only one bartender making drinks and maybe at most two waiters, which felt like an understaffing problem once again. By the time we had our drinks in hand, it was about 90 minutes past our original reservation time!

The drinks themselves were about $15 each and tasty, (hence it retaining 3 stars in this review) but ultimately not worth the effort to get there. A note for future guests as well - they add a compulsory 20% tip. Our bill was modest - there were only a handful of us, and we ordered one drink each - which makes this compulsory tip feel atypical and off-putting. We would have happily tipped 20% if given the choice, but having our choice taken away is an icky feeling and a bad way to end...

We stayed here for a weekend and the hotel portion was fantastic! One of the main reasons why we opted for the Hotel Philips was because of the P.S. Speakeasy! The promotional materials was exciting and impressive. Unfortunately, the venue and staff were subpar for the theme that the hotel presents. It was busy, but the staff appeared overwhelmed and were most comfortable behind the bar. We waited over 30 minutes for a server and when no one came by , we walked up to the bar to place an order and were instructed by the manager to go back to our table and that they would come to the table to take our order. Another 10 minutes passed and we were finally able to make that order. The entertainment was fantastic and this jazz ensemble was exactly what we wanted to listen to. Nice music, great energy from the crowd and entertainers, refined art deco theme of the hotel….and your drinks are slugged out to you by hand because the servers don’t use trays. Memories of a college dive bar with sticky floors! The server spilled half of my beer on the floor and the chair and didn’t even have a napkin. We had to flag down the server several more times to replenish our drinks. When it came time to settle our tab, the waitress wasn’t quite sure of the number of drinks we ordered and we suggested that she just count the number of glasses on our table because no one came by to bus our table the entire evening! Lol! We certainly didn’t mind that we were paying $15 a drink, but we were extremely disappointed that it took so long to get any service, there was little to no follow up to see if we needed any more drinks or at least bus the tables. Train the staff to serve drinks with a beverage tray and not grip the glasses from the rim. We highly recommend the hotel and don’t recommend this bar unless you want to be disappointed. Don’t come...

Walking into the speakeasy it looked nice and the host was nice. We ended up having a smaller party than expected and offered to live to a smaller table. We were assured staying at the larger table was no issue. We waited an extended amount of time to order drinks and ended up have to go find the waitress. Received our first round of drinks and the expresso martini has a burnt taste. When the waitress decided to grace our table again after a long wait, explained the martini tasted burnt. The waitress then proceeded to tell me that they are made in a batch and no one else had complained. She rudely took the glass and said so you want a replacement. Then made sure we knew it was a replacement. She then came back to the table and said your two hour reservation is up we need this table to seat six, mind you we had already been there three hours and offered to move to a smaller table.

We were out to celebrate a birthday. The waitress was rude and hateful. When she realized we were very dissatisfied with her service the whole night she suddenly was full of excuses. O I’m so sorry I don’t normally work the weekends. We are very busy.

You work in the service industry. Don’t make excuses for your poor service and attitude now that you want a tip. Don’t offer to make it better with free drinks so that you try and save face. Do better and be better.

I can assure you I will never visit this...