After nearly 70 years, KC restaurant closing its main dining room. It has other plans

Customers have just a few weeks to bid tschüss to one of the most distinct dining rooms in the city.

The tea room inside Andre’s Confiserie Suisse — known for its Swiss-style chalet design — will hold its last day of service Saturday, Aug. 17.

The Bollier family, which has owned the South Plaza restaurant since 1955, is converting the space into a production facility for its chocolates and confections.

“Our business model has changed so dramatically over the years,” Andre’s owner Rene Bollier told The Star. “Thirty years ago, the tea room was 40% of our annual sales; today it’s 9%. And we’ve been putting so much effort into that 9% while the true growth potential of the company is in our chocolate sales, which are now 65% of our sales.

“We looked at a bunch of different options to expand the chocolate production without impacting the restaurant, but there was just no way to do it in an economical way,” he continued. “There’s a labor shortage, and restaurants are just a very tough business. It was not an easy decision, and it’s bittersweet, but it’s what’s best for the company.”

The restaurant will lose about 65 seats from the tea room, but it is not closing. Andre’s full-service food and drink menu will still be available for breakfast, lunch and happy hour at a handful of tables in the much smaller cafe area up front, which has about 45 seats, Bollier said, with another 16 seats on the patio when the weather’s nice.

In a Facebook post , the Bolliers mentioned quiche Lorraine, vol au vent and carrot salad as classic options that they plan to continue serving.

“We’ll have all the same dishes,” Bollier said. Hours will not change, either. Andre’s will serve breakfast from 8 to 10:30 a.m., lunch from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and a small happy hour menu until closing at 5:30 p.m.

Andre and Elsbeth Bollier emigrated from Basel, Switzerland, to Kansas City in 1955 and opened Andre’s that same year at 5008 Main St. The restaurant moved in 1960 to 5018 Main St., where it has been ever since. (The original freestanding building at that address was demolished in 1976 and replaced with the larger building Andre’s operates in today.)

Andre and Elsbeth’s son, Marcel, and his wife, Connie, took over the business in the mid-1980s. Rene, their son, became president in 2002 and owns Andre’s with his wife, Nancy.

The restaurant once had locations in St. Louis, Denver, Houston and Menlo Park, California, but all have since closed.

An Overland Park location, known as Andre’s Rivaz , remains open in Hawthorne Plaza at 4929 W. 119th St. It is run by Andre and Elsbeth’s daughter, Brigitte Bollier, with her husband Kevin Gravino.

In a sense, the shifting focus at the flagship South Plaza location hearkens back to the company’s original vision nearly 70 years ago, Bollier said.

“My grandfather’s plan for Andre’s was to create a luxury chocolate brand, but Kansas City wasn’t quite ready for it at the time,” Bollier said. “So he and my grandmother transitioned from the original concept to serving traditional European-style lunches and baked goods to get people in the door, in the hopes they’d buy chocolates on the way out. So, by growing the chocolate side of the business like we have over the past seven years, we are kind of getting back to my grandfather’s original idea.”