Nightlife in Leavenworth

The kitchen crew at Hickok's Bar & Grill embraces the idea of the American melting pot, inviting red-chili chicken tacos, enchiladas, and goat-cheese-and-chorizo fondito to mingle with north-of-the-border favorites including 8-ounce burgers, BLTs, and steak-and-blue-cheese wraps. The bountiful mix of cultures pairs well with a list of domestic and imported beers served alongside housemade margaritas and sangria. Guests munch their meals amid rustically elegant décor, complete with a western-style bar, brick walls and diamond-studded barstools.

Each plate of Moxie's barbecue is two days in the making—cooks must first ornament meat with a spicy rub, marinate it overnight, and smoke it for 12–16 hours. Though the restaurant's homemade salsa and hand-formed half-pound burgers don't spend as much time in the studio as Moxie's ribs, they supply equally potent flavors, as do the four secret-recipe barbecue sauces hailed by Jessica Huska of nightlifekc.com as "nothing short of exceptional."

The restaurant's lively setting won The Pitch’s Best Place to Dance in Kansas City award in 2011, and even those without dancing shoes can don their drinking masks and sip cocktails at the full bar or goggle at 12 televisions, including a giant HDTV with a Nintendo Wii. Moxie's frequent special events include karaoke on Wednesday nights as well as pool tournaments played out on the bar and grill's high-quality Diamond billiard tables and played back in the stories second-place finishers tell their housekeeping robots in 2028.

The Blue Line celebrates all things sports with a menu of pub grub and a draft-beer lineup worthy of hoisting toward the eatery’s flat-screen televisions, which sit above its namesake—a bar emblazoned with a thick, blue line “that shines like new ice,” according to The Pitch. As build-your-own burgers and zesty wings sate hunger, bartenders pour drafts from craft brewers that include Schlafly, Boulevard, and New Belgium until 3 a.m. every night. The menu also contains—albeit barely—the Hat Trick, a burger composed of 1.5 pounds of Angus beef, a fried egg, three kinds of cheese, bacon, veggies, and an onion ring stacked irresponsibly near the top. Each day, the bar’s TVs stream footage of sports games, which are interrupted from time to time by live bands and anti-sports legislation.

A rigid Western obsession with time tables and organized schedules has left the American spirit dangerously confined. Today's Groupon offers improvisation, the well-paved road to free thinking, with a ticket to see The Trip Fives Improv Comedy live at the Westport Coffeehouse on January 9 at 6:30 p.m. for $5. Welcome in a new year with unstale jokes you can't see coming, despite your resolution to nurture clairvoyance.

You can strum a guitar while blowing a French horn and clinking your cymbal-knees together, but no one will pay a lick until you can play two full pianos at once. Today’s Groupon doubles your musicology with $20 worth of admission and beverages at Ernie Biggs Dueling Piano Bar for $10. Singing “Piano Man” is all well and good, but making it “Piano Men” is arguably better.

KC's martini bar and DJ lounge. Colorful retro decor with 2nd and 3rd level and huge outdoor patio. Bocce ball and skee ball. Chill spot early on and rocking DJ bar late night on the weekends.