The best table in Smithville right now sits inside a building that used to be called Humphrey's Bar & Grill. It is not a new restaurant in the way people usually mean that. It is an old idea, run by someone else, in a building that already had a different name once.
For eleven years, Smithville had one restaurant that people in Kansas City actually talked about. Jonathan Justus and his wife, Camille Eklof, opened Justus Drugstore in 2007 inside the former pharmacy that had belonged to Justus's own family. The place became a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation's Best New Restaurant award that same year, and Justus himself was named a Beard semifinalist again in 2016. Food & Wine wrote about it more than once. The New York Times Magazine sent someone to write about it. Zagat's survey of the region's best restaurants ranked it number one for the Kansas City area's small-town category. None of that happened because Smithville had a marketing budget. It happened because a chef who trained in France and San Francisco came home and started foraging local ingredients and buying beef from small area farmers, and people drove out from the city to eat it.
Then, in 2018, Justus and Eklof temporarily closed the restaurant to focus on their second concept near the Country Club Plaza, and someone made them an offer on the Smithville building they couldn't turn down. The drugstore that used to be the Drugstore restaurant became something else. Black Dirt, the Plaza concept, closed within about a year of the sale. A planned relaunch of Justus Drugstore in Kansas City's Hyde Park neighborhood, announced in 2022, was still stalled as of late 2024, with the project reportedly more than two-thirds finished and no timeline for opening.
That is the part most people already half remember. Here is the part that changes the picture: Justus is cooking in Smithville again.
He's a consultant now, not the owner
In 2024, a restaurateur named Dustin Racen took over the old Humphrey's space at 111 N. Bridge St. Racen isn't a Smithville name. He used to run the Tank Room, a music venue in Kansas City's Crossroads district, before relocating to the Lake of the Ozarks, where he now owns Lake House 13 and The Cuddy Cabin. The Smithville connection came through his longtime friend and college roommate, Kyle Squires, who lives in town and pitched Racen on the space. Together they brought in Justus as a consultant, not a partner, to help build the menu and train the staff.
The new spot, Gizmos Tavern, was originally supposed to open in mid-July 2024. It slipped to early fall, timed so the kitchen could be running in time for Festi-Ville, the downtown festival held in Smithville that same weekend. Racen has described the food as upscale gastropub, and he's been direct about what Justus brings to it: a scratch kitchen, quality ingredients, and a menu that nods to the old Drugstore without trying to be it. Justus put it more personally, saying he'd hoped years ago that other people would build on what he started downtown, and that it's only now, unexpectedly, that cool projects are actually happening in Smithville.
What that looks like on the plate: pork from Paradise Locker Meats in Trimble, Missouri, and beef from Hertzog Meat Co. in Butler, Missouri, folded into a menu of scratch-made bar food with some real reach, cioppino, bacon-wrapped chicken livers, a burger built from a proprietary local-farm blend of sirloin, brisket, chuck and bacon. It is not the Drugstore's tasting-menu ambition. It is something closer to what the old regulars actually wanted the whole time, according to reporting at the time: the same sourcing philosophy, served as a burger and a beer instead of a reservation.
The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. When one restaurant with one chef-owner carries a town's culinary reputation, that reputation is only as durable as that one lease. Smithville learned that in 2018. This time, the person with the pedigree isn't the one whose name is on the liquor license, which means the town's food identity isn't hanging on a single owner's next career move the way it did before.
The rest of the square, as of this summer
Gizmos isn't operating in a vacuum. A citywide restaurant snapshot from August 2026 lists it alongside Kozak's Laketown Grill, Captain's Corner, Grassroots Garden Lounge, Aroma Bistro, BOKBOK, Snack Daddy's, Between the Buoys, The Lake Stop, and Chops BBQ and Catering as the current lineup locals are actually rating. That's a wider bench than Smithville had a decade ago, when Justus Drugstore was more or less the only reason to expect a serious meal in town rather than a fast-casual stop on the way to somewhere else.
Downtown programming has kept pace. The Smithville Main Street District, the group that manages the commercial core along Commercial Avenue, ran its annual Hot Summer Nights concert on August 8, 2026, part of what the district describes as events happening almost every weekend through the season. None of this is accidental. It's the same kind of activation Racen was betting on when he opened Gizmos to coincide with Festi-Ville instead of just picking whatever date the contractors finished.
Where the food actually comes from
The sourcing story doesn't stop at the restaurant door. A few miles outside town in Edgerton, Perdue Homestead Farm runs a 20-acre operation between Platte City and Smithville, growing Certified Naturally Grown produce and selling to what the farm describes as multiple well-known restaurants in the area along with the general public. Through September, they're a regular at the Smithville Farmer's Market, held Wednesdays from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 108 W. Main Street. It's the same kind of small-farm relationship that stocked the original Justus Drugstore kitchen and that echoes in Gizmos' meat sourcing from Trimble and Butler. If you've eaten locally grown produce in Smithville this summer, there's a decent chance it moved through a supply chain this short, whether it landed on a restaurant plate or your own kitchen counter.
Working it off on the water side of town
Smithville Lake's trail network, managed by Clay County Parks and Recreation, is bigger and more varied than the single lakeside path most people picture. The Little Platte North Trail is a 2.5-mile loop along the higher ridges on the west side of the lake's Little Platte arm, with a trailhead that includes a bike fix-it station. On the east side, the Bonebender Trail runs 6.0 miles through hardwood forest and restored grassland, and the combined Crows Creek Trail System, made up of the Anita B. Gorman and Cabin Fever trails, covers 8.9 miles with lookout points and rest benches along the shoreline. Farther out, the Little Platte South Trail is a 9.6-mile out-and-back, paved and popular with road cyclists and runners, according to AllTrails user data, with rolling terrain that's easier through the middle stretch than at either end.
| Trail | Length | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Little Platte North | 2.5 mi loop | Quick walk or short ride, west ridge views |
| Eagle's View | 1.5 mi | Short loop, eagle sightings in winter |
| Smoke and Davey/Backbone | 2.7 mi | Lake shore access, grassland restoration views |
| Crows Creek System (Gorman + Cabin Fever) | 8.9 mi combined | Longer outing with multiple access points |
| Bonebender | 6.0 mi | Hardwood forest, east shoreline |
| Little Platte South | 9.6 mi out-and-back | Paved, road biking and running |
None of these require a boat or a lake house to use. They're accessible from public trailheads with parking, and several are dog-friendly on leash, which makes them as much a weeknight habit as a weekend event.
The throughline
Put the restaurant story and the trail map next to each other and a pattern shows up. Smithville's daily-life upgrades this year aren't coming from a big outside developer or a franchise rollout. They're coming from people who already had a stake in the town: a family farm in Edgerton supplying both restaurant kitchens and the Wednesday market on Main Street, a downtown district scheduling concerts almost every weekend, a hometown friend who talked an out-of-town restaurateur into the old Humphrey's space, and a chef who never fully left. The square looks different than it did in 2018, but the reason it looks different is that it kept drawing on the same local relationships instead of replacing them.
If you're curious what your own place near the square might be worth in today's market, the team at Gateway Real Estate & Auction knows this stretch of Clay County as well as anyone. Reach out any time, or start with a free instant home valuation to see where your Smithville home stands.
