It’s rush hour on a Friday evening in Sylvan Grove, Kansas, and Main Street is mostly empty, save for the rare truck or tractor.
But inside one of the rough limestone buildings, Fly Boy Brewery and Eats are filling up.
“We eat here as often as we can,” said Sandy Labertew, sitting at a table of eight. “Because the business is in Sylvan and we want to do as much as we can to keep things open here.”
Like thousands of other small towns, Sylvan Grove was built around agriculture, to supply and educate big families running lots of small farms in the area. There was a rail stop here where the grain went out and money came in.
Those days are long gone. Now the families are small, and the farms themselves are generally enormous and are increasingly owned by people living in distant cities. The railroad pulled out years ago. Since 1880, the town has shed 65% of its population.
It’s tough to make a living out here, and not the most obvious place to buy a restaurant. But that’s exactly what Grant Wagner did three years ago.
“I just got tired of making food for rich people,” Wagner said. “I wanted to go back to making food that I cared about for people I cared about.”
Wagner grew up in Bennington, Kansas, another little town where Wagner says people knew how to work with their hands, fix stuff, and make do.
Like many ambitious rural kids, he left town after high school. Wagner went to culinary school and worked his way up through some of the best restaurants in the Kansas City metro, like Bluestem and Justus Drugstore.
Eventually, Wagner became executive chef at JJ’s on the Plaza, where he says customers might drop $2,000-$3,000 on dinner.
“I couldn’t relate to the people that I was cooking the food for, and cooking, it’s a passion project, making any kind of food,” said Wagner.
When he quit JJ’s about a decade ago, Wagner moved back to central Kansas. He did consulting for local restaurants, helping them open and, often, helping them close.
That’s how he met the original owners of Fly Boy: Clay and Linda Haring, who hired him to plan their menu and run the kitchen.
Wagner left to operate a food truck, but in the middle of the pandemic, he got a call from the Harings. They were going to close Fly Boy — or sell it to him.
Wagner called up his friend Lucas Hass. They put the money together and went into business.
