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Three Bees Pottery & Coffee Shop is an independent, locally owned café at 925 Southwest Blvd in the Rosedale neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, blending three businesses under one roof: a coffee shop pouring locally roasted espresso, a tamale kitchen built on a Chihuahua, Mexico masa recipe, and a shop selling hand-painted Talavera pottery imported from Mexico.

Description

Three Bees Pottery & Coffee Shop is an independent café on Southwest Boulevard in the Rosedale neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas. It is unusual among KC coffee shops in fusing three distinct businesses into one storefront: a coffee bar, a tamale kitchen, and a retail pottery shop.12

The coffee program pours locally roasted beans from Blip Roasters, the West Bottoms / Kansas City roaster, which rotates its sourcing quarterly.3 The tamale kitchen is the heart of the food side: the shop offers roughly eight year-round staple varieties (pork, chicken, beef, cheese, veggie, and vegan), along with rotating seasonal dessert tamales — most notably a signature strawberry tamale made with fresh berries and house-made strawberry jam.2 The retail floor sells brightly hand-painted Talavera pottery imported from Mexico, with the ownership team making periodic buying trips south of the border to replenish stock.3

The shop sits within the Southwest Boulevard corridor, a historically Latino commercial strip straddling the Kansas–Missouri state line and long a center of Mexican-American community and food culture in the metro. The Talavera-and-tamales concept is rooted directly in that context.13

Ownership and history

PeriodOperator
Founding → ~2022Nick Medrano (original founder)
~2022 → presentRichard Clifton, Kitty Jackson, Daniel Reynolds, Drew Thorson (current ownership team)

Three Bees was originally founded by Nick Medrano. By the early 2020s Medrano was ready to step away to focus on his landscaping business and put the shop up for sale — reportedly advertising it on a sign out front for $10,000.3 Drew Thorson saw the sign and reached out to Richard Clifton; the two, together with Clifton’s mother Kitty Jackson and brother Daniel Reynolds, bought the business and re-opened it around 2022 under the same name.3 A 2024-era profile noted the team had purchased the shop “two years ago,” consistent with a ~2022 transition.2

Under the new team, Richard Clifton leads recipe development for the tamales. The masa recipe comes from his stepmother, who grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico; the result is a Northern Mexican–style tamale that Mexican customers have described as resembling authentic home cooking.23 The new owners retained both the pottery side and the Three Bees name, continuing the Mexico buying trips to keep the Talavera stock current.3

The original founding year predates the well-documented 2022 ownership transition and is not yet confirmed from a primary source.

See also

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Three Bees KCK — official website, “Espresso, Coffee, Tamales, and Pottery.” https://threebeeskck.com/ ↩ ↩2

  2. Kansas City Magazine, “Hot Tamale” — profile of Three Bees Pottery & Coffee Shop, Richard Clifton, the Chihuahua masa recipe, the strawberry tamale, and the ~2022 ownership purchase. https://kansascitymag.com/hot-tamales/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Rosedale Development Association, “New Team Re-Opens Three Bees Pottery and Coffee Shop” — original founder Nick Medrano, the $10,000 for-sale sign, the new ownership team (Clifton, Jackson, Reynolds, Thorson), Blip Roasters coffee sourcing, and the Talavera-pottery Mexico buying trips. https://rosedale.org/all-post/new-team-re-opens-three-bees-pottery-and-coffee-shop/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  4. Yelp / Visit Kansas City KS listings — address (925 Southwest Blvd, KCK 66103), phone (913) 703-7229, hours, and active operating status. https://www.yelp.com/biz/three-bees-pottery-and-coffee-shop-kansas-city · https://www.visitkansascityks.com/listing/three-bees-pottery-&-coffee-shop/600/ ↩

See also

Categories
  • Locally owned
  • Coffee
  • Kck