Doo-Dah Diner marks 10 years of monkey bread, biscuits and gravy and crazy big crowds

Back in 2012, Patrick Shibley was a lifelong restaurant guy with a long resume but no job.

The son of Wichita restaurant and nightclub pioneer Kay Shibley (famous for owning 1970s hot spot Kamiel’s Club) and a Johnson County Community College culinary school graduate, Shibley had worked for years as a manager for YaYa’s Eurobistro’s parent company and also had worked with the team that opened Gaslamp Grille.

He told his wife of two years, Timirie, that he might be ready to open his own restaurant, and the two went to check out an old Radio Shack building just off of Kellogg that he’d seen listed on Craigslist. The space had been home in recent years to a string of short-lived restaurants.

Everyone they knew told them not to do it. They did it anyway.

“We only had a month from the time we looked at the building until we opened for business,” Timirie remembers. “We did most of the remodeling ourselves.”

Now, a decade later, the Shibleys are celebrating a big birthday at their Doo-Dah Diner, 206 E. Kellogg, and they’re also celebrating success they could only have dreamed of when they sent their first plates of biscuits and gravy out of the kitchen. Doo-Dah Diner now is one of the city’s most successful, most recognized restaurants, and on weekends, people still are willing to wait as long as it takes for a table.

It’s been an eventful 10 years, too, a decade marked by a major expansion, visits from celebrities like Harrison Ford and Henry Winkler, an appearance on a nationally televised Cooking Channel show, and adoration from a group of devoted ESPN announcers who discovered the diner while covering basketball at Wichita State University nine years ago and haven’t stopped talking about it — on air — since.

Biscuits and gravy dreams

Doo-Dah Diner opened for business on Sept. 12, 2012, serving breakfast and lunch only. The Shibleys had a plan: Patrick would head the kitchen, Timirie would lead the front of the house, and they’d populate the menu with heaping plates full of the type of home-cooking recipes they grew up eating. Every diner would get a serving of sticky, gooey monkey bread for free when they sat down.

From opening day, the menu featured many of the dishes that still draw people in today, including crab cake eggs Benedict, a breakfast burrito smothered with green chili, banana bread french toast, meatloaf, and the Brutus, which is a chicken fried steak piled with hash browns, caramelized onions, sausage gravy and two eggs.

Their landlords, who eventually sold the couple the building, did their best to help spread the word about the new diner, and customers started to trickle in. Business continued building slowly thanks to word-of-mouth advertising. There was no budget for actual advertising.

Timirie insists that everything changed after Dining with Denise reviewed the restaurant in The Wichita Eagle five months later with the headline “Do try the food at Doo-Dah Diner.”

“What had been an all-time high sales record became our daily average after that review,” Timirie said. “Patrick promised that we were going to level off. He said sales were supposed to decline and that’s normal with any new restaurant, any new concept. But that never happened.”

The 2,000 square-foot diner became the hottest breakfast ticket in town. It was so busy and waits were so long that the Shibleys realized they needed more space. They’d been utilizing a massive 3,000 square-foot area attached to the east side of the diner as a waiting area and also to sell Doo-Dah and Wichita-themed merchandise, but their kitchen wasn’t big enough to support adding seats, something hungry and waiting customers had a hard time understanding.

Robin Monroe, who along with front-of-house manager Laura Shoemake has worked for the diner all of its 10 years, said she remembers the early pandemonium, and she remembers that she wasn’t surprised by it.

She knew the restaurant was special when she walked in looking for a job during a particularly low point in her life, she said, and she immediately felt at home. She liked that the Shibleys were willing to work day-in and day-out as hard as they expected their employees to work, and she admired that they were proud “second-chance employers” willing to hire people who’d had convictions or substance abuse issues in their past.

“I just knew that lightning was going to strike,” Monroe said. “The food was too good. The people were too good. I was given a second chance here. I was given an opportunity to change my life.”

Room to grow

Five years after opening, the Shibleys announced plans to close down the original diner for a massive remodel that would result in a bigger kitchen and a seating capacity that would jump from 92 to 180. The catch: The original diner would have to close for the project, which would incorporate the waiting area, so the couple leased a vacant diner space at 1530 S. Webb Road, which would keep them in business during the months-long remodel and serve as a second location afterward. They closed the downtown diner on Dec. 30, 2018, and opened the Webb Road location a few weeks later.

In the end, the building wasn’t up to snuff, and when the remodeled diner reopened in July 2019, the Shibleys decided to give up the Webb Road location, saying they’d look for another east-side spot after they got reestablished downtown.

But eight months later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, ushering in the most challenging phase of Doo-Dah’s otherwise charmed run.

The Shibleys closed down the restaurant from March until late June of 2020, and after, it took a while to rebound as the restaurant struggled with how to return to safe indoor dining. The Shibleys cut down the menu and suspended the restaurant’s popular Sunday brunch buffet for nearly a year.

Since the pandemic has subsided, the Shibleys have struggled with hiring and keeping staff — just as most restaurants have. Still, Timirie said, sales have rebounded and of late have even broken records, though “labor and food costs are trying to rob all of our joy,” she said. “We just need a great big group hug.”

When they look back at the past decade, the Shibleys say, they’re amazed by all that’s happened at the diner. Their daughters, who were just girls when the restaurant opened and who worked there and got to know customers through their teens, have grown up and started their own careers. Beloved regulars have come and gone, including members of the Wichita State University men’s basketball team, who found the diner because the restaurant catered food on game days, and the diner’s longtime No. 1 fan Richard Holmes, who ate there almost daily and would write “counter chats” about the people he met while sitting at the counter. Holmes, the diner’s most well-known regular, died last year at age 89.

The Shibleys say they not sure what the next decade might hold. A second Doo-Dah location isn’t out of the question, though no plans are in the works. And Patrick still would like to add evening dinner hours should the labor situation ever improve.

The Shibleys are not afraid to try new things, though, as evidenced by the various side projects they tried over the years, including opening a take-and-bake market next door, offering evening pizza service, even launching a line of doggie treats. But they’ve always returned their focus to the diner itself.

“We are definitely not 10 and done,” Timirie said. “For this next chapter, it’s really time to let Patrick and I come up from setting a solid foundation of a decade and see how we can really spread the Doo-Dah brand in other creative ways.”

Birthday buffet

Doo-Dah Diner will celebrate its 10-year anniversary with an all-you-can eat Cajun feast on Sept. 20.

What: A buffet featuring crawfish, etouffee, jambalaya, gumbo, blackened chicken pasta, collard greens and more

When: 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Sept. 20

Where: Doo-Dah Diner, 206 E. Kellogg

Price: $30 for adults, $15 for ages 6-10 and 75+

Reservations: Call 316-265-7011