By Joe Jarosz
Northeast News
April 8, 2015

KANSAS CITY, Missouri — Kansas City’s first ramen shop needs your help.

Scheduled to open in Columbus Park this summer, Josh and Abbey-Jo Eans want to open Kansas City’s first ramen noodle shop. The husband and wife duo plan to share a room — more precisely, the garage — with its sister restaurant, Happy Gillis café and hangout. There will be about five different types of ramen available (tonkotsu, chicken, dashi, vegetarian), as well as canned beers and unique sodas. Even the bowls used to hold the ramen will be local and handmade.

The plan is to be open four nights a week, Thursday — Sunday. Happy Gillis would operate in the mornings and afternoons and the duo would sell ramen noodles at night. They could extend the hours as business grows. The couple decided on ramen because Josh said it’s, “delicious and approachable,” their model for the Happy Gillis.

“We want to make delicious food affordable and available to all,” Josh said. “You see, it all started with our attached garage space, and kicking around ideas for what we could do. It kept whispering ‘ramen’ to us, so we answered. The space is perfect for it, small and unfussy. We believe that ramen is the perfect meal, all contained within a bowl. Noodle soups are deeply satisfying, and we wanted to bring the first Ramen Shop to Kansas City.”

Josh added his wife and he have been eating ramen for years, but cooking the noodles are completely different from eating them. He said perfecting the recipe has become a more recent obsession, “which we are hoping we can share with Kansas City.”

The couple decided to launch a Kickstarter page earlier this year, with different incentives for different monetary donation levels. The rewards range from a shoutout on social media and attending a cooking class to a sneak peak of the restaurant before an official opening and ramen for life.

“My wife came up with most of the ideas for rewards on the Kickstarter and she had the great idea for the video,” Josh said. “She put in a lot of the work to kick start the Kickstarter campaign.”

The funds raised from the campaign would help build a bathroom, turning a dry storage area into a walk-in area, cleaning up the basement and refurbishing it into the new dry storage space, electrical and plumbing work and new appliances and dinnerware.

As of Monday, the couple have collected $28,000 of their $37,000 goal. The campaign ends Sunday, April 19. To help them with their goal you can donate at this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1161502265/columbus-park-ramen-shop-kansas-citys-first-ramen.