A Little Bit of Salt...and A Lot of Iguanas

An Ode to The Salty Iguana.

If you’re not from the Kansas City area, you’re understandably confused by this headline. It won’t help—in fact, it might make it more confusing—but for those non locals who choose to read on, let me set the scene for you.

The lighting is borderline blinding. But then again, that might be the color palate. Once a dark grey-green drop down ceiling, it’s been raised to lessen the claustrophobia, but it’s also been painted—neon yellows and reds and blues and greens. And that’s just the ceiling. The table tops are all different colors too, though not the same hues.

The floors are a light laminate, better for disguising all the broken chips the servers are constantly trying to sweep up. The floors are newer, but not that new, just new to those of us who knew Salty way back when. Like any restaurant of a certain age, those floors used to be carpeted, the same dull color of the ceiling, not good for hiding salsa stains or cleaning up chips, because that made sense.

To be fair, it made more sense than the Iguanas.

If you’ve ever been to a Salty Iguana location, then you can already picture the iguanas. For those who can’t, let me tell you—they are EVERYWHERE. Cartoon murals of iguanas at the park, on a ferris wheel, at the beach, at a bar. The Kansas Jayhawk Iguanas and the Kansas City Chief Iguanas, many with faded signatures from players long gone….I’m not kidding, look for yourself.

Insane, right? I’ve tried to count them before, multiple times, but I don’t know how many iguanas there are. Somewhere, someone, the artist possibly, has a guess, but after thousands of hours in at the Prairie Village Salty Iguana, I still don’t know the answer. And now I never will.

My texts, my DMs, they’ve all been popping off this week with the news that The Salty Iguana’s in Prairie Village and Lawrence were abruptly shut down. If you’re a local looking for answers, I’m sorry to say I have none. I know just as much as you, the same headline you screenshotted, so did I, sending it to countless people asking “did you hear?” All these people, they’re all scrolling through the mental album of memories we all have at Salty (not to brag but my album is bigger than most) and that’s what I’ll be sharing here. Because, when I got the first text about Salty being shut down, those memories, even ones I hadn’t thought of in years, all came flooding back. And like the highly sensitive person I am, I cried.

A lot.

To many, that will seem like an irrational response. I happen to agree, but to be fair, I spent a larger chunk of my life running around that restaurant, so some tears are warranted.

When I was little, my mom, my aunts, my cousins and I would go to Salty every Monday. If we weren’t there on Monday, you could expect us on Wednesday, but usually Monday because Monday at Salty was taco Monday. You might be saying to yourself “Lucy, it’s taco Tuesdays, not Mondays” but no — originally, Salty Iguana had it’s taco nights on Mondays (eventually they would conform to society and that really bothered me, but I digress.) And we went on Mondays, unless someone was craving fajitas and if that was the case, then Wednesdays.

We’d sit at one of the big tops, but NOT a big top in “the kids’ room”. This limited us to one of the three remaining big tops in the front room, but it was a nonnegotiable—we weren’t sitting “back there”. I would come to find out that practically everyone, especially regulars, thought of that iguana mural filled room as “the kids’ room” and no one, even people with kids, wanted to sit in “the kids’ room”. So every week we sat at one of the other three big tops and ordered our Iguana Dip and tacos (or chicken fingers in my case) and then went around the corner afterwards, to the pet shop, to look at the puppies.

Twenty years ago this week we stopped going to Salty for a little bit. A few years, a few months, I’m not sure how long, I just know we stopped, because twenty years ago this week my cousin and best friend was in a bike accident. And a few weeks later, he was gone.

We couldn’t eat the Iguana Dip. We couldn’t sit at our table on Mondays or sometimes Wednesdays because Jake liked fajitas. We couldn’t ask for our usual servers, Courtney or Megan. For a long time, Salty was one of those places we avoided, hoping somehow it would make the reality seem less real. That somehow, we were in a bad nightmare and we’d one day wake up and go back to sit at our table and order Jake his own salsa because he notoriously double dipped. Thinking of Jake and his salsa was the main reason I cried when I heard The Salty Iguana closed.

I don’t know when we went back. I don’t know who went first. Somewhere between thirteen and sixteen though, I went back. I ordered Iguana Dip, I said hi to our favorite servers who were now behind the bar. Not everyone went back, but my mom and I did and, at my surprise sixteenth birthday party, held on the Salty Iguana patio with about fifteen girls (some of whom were popular girls I just talked about because they were cool which unfortunately inspired my mom to invited them to my Salty birthday party), I asked for a job abdication and became a hostess. Another evolution in my Iguana Dip filled DNA.

You might not care, but I need you to know—I was an excellent hostess. And, no matter what anyone else tells you, it was all bullshit. Some instinct, but mostly bullshit. A pure guessing game of wait times and a puzzle of who to sit where and who not to double sit and people saying to me “not the kids’ room”, but I was good host. I worked that host stand all the way through high school. I came back during the summers in college, my manager saying to me “Lucy, isn’t it time you started serving?” but, nope. Not me. I was not made to wait tables, I was born to be a host.

Until the summer between Sophomore and Junior year of college when I rear ended a brand new Mercedes on the way to see The Hangover II (which I still have not seen).

On that day, after my mom arriving to smooth talk the rich asshole into not calling insurance, after driving home one care behind the other, she watched me take a right turn when I should have gone straight and says she knew I was going to Salty to tell my manager I needed to become a server. I had to pay off that car after all!

All this longwinded storytelling is completely unnecessary, but it’s just another layer of my Salty DNA. It’s not even the final layer. Neither is me getting a job at the Lawrence location, waiting tables on game days, during my senior year of college. Neither is me coming back to PV after graduation, working every shift I could so I could save up money to move to Chicago. The final layer isn’t even me returning every few months from Chicago, eventually bringing boyfriend back with me to meet my Salty fam—to introduce him to aunts and uncles, regulars and friends behind the bar To introduce him to Iguana Dip, smokin’ nachos and mini chimis. To show him the notorious iguanas.

The final layer is even when, in the aftermath of lockdowns and social distancing, when Bill was trying to decide where to propose, he chose The Salty Iguana patio. With my margarita and Iguana Dip nearby, friends and family gathered (not to close but close enough).

I was raised at the Salty Iguana, I grew up in there, I had birthdays there, I even got engaged there. And now, I can’t go back.

If you’re still reading, you’re probably one of the few people texting me right now reminiscing about that white cheese dip. One of the people who felt some tie to those silly iguanas and their weird antics. You’re probably like me, someone whose Shirley Temples eventually turned into pitchers of margaritas. You probably went there with someone you don’t talk to anymore, who isn’t here anymore. Something about the doors closing unlocked memories you didn’t even realize were still there.

Loss is a silly word to use when talking about a restaurant, but that’s what I feel. I worry without it I'll lose the memories that are already slightly faded—the one of me waiting on my grandma who downed a fishbowl margarita the second I dropped it off and asked for another. Of playing I-Spy with my cousins, of mixing our Iguana Dip with the salsa, of my aunt accidentally revealing the Easter Bunny was fake because we were so quiet at the other end of the table. Of the guys in the kitchen laughing at me because I thought embarassada translated to embarrassed, of the bartender applauding my mom because I was twenty years old and revealed to everyone I thought marijuana and pot were two different things, of drinking bud lights with the other hostess during the holiday party. The memory of Bill proposing, of us bringing our kids there to meet my friends, to see the regulars. To try Iguana Dip, which they have not.

It feels a loss to think that, in all my plans to move back home, with all the houses I send to Bill to look at, I now don’t get to say “and it’s close to Salty” anymore. Somewhere, maybe naively, I held onto this dream that I would start going there on Mondays again. Or maybe Wednesdays, but certainly not Tuesdays, and I’d ask not to be in “the kids’ room”. I’d have a standing reservation and would send out a mass text that afternoon asking who was coming and if we needed more chairs. I naively thought that, in some crazy way, taking my kids there and ordering them the chicken fingers and a Shirley Temples would maybe mean Jake would walk back in and sit down with us. He’d order his own salsa and try and help them count the iguanas and fail. Or at the very least, I’d get to pretend he was on his way.

That white cheese dip and those silly iguanas made an impression on me and so, when I heard the news, yes, I did cry a little. Then I wrote it a goodbye letter, like any sane person would.

(If it reopens next week after I just poured my heart out, I’m going to be very embarrassed. And very happy. And I’ll probably cry again.)