Flashback Friday: Red Mesa Grill was a spicy restaurant pioneer on Wichita’s west side

Denise Neil
·2 min read

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature that will appear every Friday on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant, Red Mesa Grill, opened on Wichita’s west side 24 years ago.

When Richard Waite opened Red Mesa Grill in March of 2000 at 756 N. Tyler, NewMarket Square was still more than a year away from opening. The city’s first free-standing Starbucks wouldn’t arrive for another three years. Grandy’s had just closed.

Some wondered if the untested west-side was a good place to open a restaurant, especially considering that in the previous year, five full-service restaurants — Piccadilly Grill, Red Bean’s Bayou Grill, Roosevelt’s, Semolina and Victory Sports Grille (all since closed) had just opened and gobbled up the market.

But Waite, a former general manager at Carlos O’ Kelly’s, was optimistic. He was also the owner of Red Bean’s Bayou Grill, which was an instant success when it opened in 1999 at 21st and Ridge, and he maintained that far west Wichita had hardly any Mexican restaurants — and no restaurants serving Southwestern cuisine.

Red Mesa did make it, and in 2001, Waite even added a second Red Mesa — at 127 W. Highway 54 in Andover. Customers loved the menu, which deviated from the standard Tex Mex offered around town. Red Mesa served posole — a traditional Mexican stew with pork, beef and hominy — and its Cilantro Pesto Butter Cream Enchiladas were the stuff of local legend.

Six years later, though, all those NewMarket Square restaurants were cutting into Waite’s bottom line, and he announced he was closing Red Mesa on the west side. Its final day in business was May 21, 2006. (Waite also closed the Andover Red Mesa, in July 2004, after its lease expired.)

Red Mesa founder Richard Waite is pictured inside the restaurant at 756 N. Tyler in 2006, shortly after he closed it down.
Red Mesa founder Richard Waite is pictured inside the restaurant at 756 N. Tyler in 2006, shortly after he closed it down.

Waite’s customers were so sad that he added many of Red Mesa’s most popular dishes — including its chips and salsa and some of its fajitas, enchiladas and combo plates — to the menu at the Red Bean’s Bayou Grill at 7447 W. 21st St. That restaurant lasted until 2014.

In the nearly two decades since Red Mesa went under, west Wichita has continued to grow and now has its own robust restaurant scene. But nothing has lasted at the old Red Mesa spot at Central and Tyler, which since has been home to a long list of businesses, including Kababs, Augustino Brewing Company, Angry Elephant and Lito’s, which closed in October 2023. The space has been vacant since.

Here’s an authentic relic from Red Mesa: an old to-go menu. Look at those prices!