STRETCH BLOG

Off the Pitch interview with STRETCH

Thu, 30 May 2013 10:39:26 -0500

Grinders owner & SportingKC fan, STRETCH chats with Callum Williams about the partnership between Grinders & SportingKC

View original video links here:
http://m.sportingkc.com/video/2013/05/30/pitch-stretch
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB7RSWBc4F0&feature=youtu.be

Grinders favorites now available inside Boulevard Members Club at Sporting Park

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:13:58 -0500

Whet your appetite, Grinders is now serving up five of their signature items inside the Boulevard Members Club at Sporting Park. The popular local eatery, located in the heart of the Crossroads Arts District in downtown Kansas City, will be among the Boulevard Members Club food choices starting Saturday thanks to a new partnership with Sporting Kansas City for the 2013 season.
"We are always interested in doing things that surprise people and enhance our fan experience,” said John Moncke, Sporting Kansas City’s VP of Stadium and Brand Revenue. “It is very exciting for us to announce that Grinders will be opening a pop-up restaurant in the Boulevard Members Club. Grinders is cool and local. This fits extremely well with the Sporting Kansas City brand.”
In addition to the full food and beverage menu available inside the Boulevard Members Club, Grinders will now be offering up their tater tots, meatball sandwiches, philly cheesesteaks, chicken strips and chicken wings at Sporting Kansas City home games. The Boulevard Members Club is open to all Members Stand ticket holders before and during matches, then welcomes all ticket holders inside its doors for postgame festivities.
“We chose Sporting because of what Sporting is about. They're so much more about the community,” said STRETCH Rumaner, the founder and owner of Grinders. “Kansas City is a huge family. And partnering up with Sporting just extends the family that much further."
Rumaner, who goes by @STRETCHartist on Twitter, opened Grinders in November 2004 and expanded with Grinders West, an upscale delicatessen, next door four years later. Since, Grinders has become a widely popular eating, drinking and musical establishment in Kansas City that has been featured on the national scene with appearances on the Food Network and Spike TV.
Last October, Grinders hosted the Sporting Kansas City playoff rally and visitors have long seen Sporting Kansas City décor inside the restaurant.
“I was always a soccer player growing up,” Rumaner said. “I actually had soccer scholarships before I went to art school and it has always been my passion. My cousin is also a soccer guy, and half my crew are all soccer fans.”
The addition of Grinders in the Boulevard Members Club complements a growing list of well-known local businesses whose products are available at Sporting Park, including Boulevard Brewing Company, Weston Brewing Company and Blanc Burgers.
The Boulevard Members Club, open for watch parties throughout the season, is located in the northeast corner of Sporting Park adjacent to the Members Stand and is a one-of-a-kind space for the club’s most vocal supporters. Designed with the input of fans, the club features a glass exterior for a direct view of the playing field and the interior includes a scarf wall, DJ booth, 30 high-definition TV’s and two projector screens.
"Sporting has been very supportive of Grinders,” Rumaner said. “Not only has the company been really cool to work with, the players and everybody behind the scenes has been just fantastic. So, why not get out to the stadium? It's our demographic. It's what I love. And you know, they need good food to go with a good sport."

Follow @GrindersKC on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest.

To view original article: http://www.sportingkc.com/news/2013/04/grinders-favorites-now-available-inside-boulevard-members-club-sporting-park

Streetside: Horribly disgusting band GWAR debuts its barbecue sauce at Grinders

Tue, 9 Apr 2013 09:55:16 -0500

by David Hudnall, The Pitch
The music industry continues to collapse, but booze sales are holding steady. In the last decade, there has been a marked increase in the number of musicians peddling their own alcoholic products. Sammy Hagar blazed the trail with Cabo Wabo tequila. Diddy has Ciroc vodka. Train offers a line of wines. (I'm "calling all angels," praying that the new 2011 Soul Sister Pinot Noir is as brawny and full-bodied as the 2009 Drops of Jupiter Petite Syrah, am I right, you guys?) The list goes on: Willie Nelson, Whitesnake, the guy from Tool.
Marketing food products is a less explored revenue stream for bands. But Gwar, a satirically grotesque thrash-metal group that regularly stages beheadings at its shows, is getting in on that action. It has a new barbecue sauce, Gwar-B-Q. And there's a local angle: Its guitarist, whose parents named him Balsac the Jaws of Death, created Gwar B-Q at Original Juan's, the sauces-and-spices manufacturing operation on Southwest Boulevard. On Monday night, Gwar debuted Gwar-B-Q on the back patio at Grinders, in an event billed as a "Meat and Meet." I didn't have a whole lot else going on.
Turnout was strong — easily more than a hundred people! Many were clad in black; some wore jackets with pins and patches on them; one guy donned a T-shirt that read, "Gwar: A Bloody Good Time." (Fake blood abounds at Gwar shows. Also common: fake jizz.) The crowd sat at picnic tables and chatted, waiting for Gwar to arrive. I got in a line and bought a bottle of Gwar-B-Q for $10. I found a bench, flagged down a waitress and ordered an "Intergalactic Gwarbage" sandwich — non-Gwar fans might call it a "pulled-pork sandwich." It came with chips.
According to info on the side of the Gwar-B-Q bottle, "Whether you slather it on ribs, chicken, seafood, or roadkill, it makes all dead things taste better." I poured some onto my sandwich. It was spicy, and it did make my sandwich taste better. But there was a bit of cognitive dissonance going on. Everything about Gwar is repulsive. We're talking about a band that dresses like mutant barbarians. They have an album called This Toilet Earth. Enjoying the sauce requires the clearing of those facts from one's mind.
As I ate, I eavesdropped on a conversation four metal nerds were having nearby. A few highlights:
"I'd definitely see Trouble over Saint Vitus."
"Fuck [Slayer guitarist] Kerry King. He turned his back on everybody."
"[Megadeth frontman] Dave [Mustaine] is not a pussy."
I snickered to my friend. A guy with long gray hair, a Batman T-shirt and an artillery belt gave me the crook eye. I was wearing an oxford button-up with a seersucker pattern. I hung my head, returned to my Intergalactic Gwarbage sandwich.
About an hour into the party, Gwar emerged in full monster regalia from its tour bus. One of the members got down on his knees and pretended to vomit on his way in. As he spit and coughed hideously, another Gwar member said, "Somebody help him." A fan walked over and patted him on the back. "Don't fuckin' touch me," the Gwar guy roared.
"You guys make my dick hard!" another fan screamed.
"Get the fuck away from me," said drummer Jizmak Da Gusha. Then he called a woman, who was attempting to take a photo with her iPhone, a "gaping sore." She swooned.
As Gwar set up behind tables to autograph posters and bottles of Gwar-B-Q, I tracked down Jeff "Stretch" Rumaner, owner of Grinders. It turns out that Rumaner and Gwar go way back — they attended Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts together back in the 1980s.
"Oh, yeah, I was in the 'Phallus in Wonderland' video. I would go on tours with Gwar in the late '80s," he said. "I built their second tour bus. I was a welder and I taught sculpture at VCU to Bobby [Gorman], who's one of their main artists. I used to get checks from Slave Pit Inc. — that's the name of the company they do business as."
Rumaner pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of his seven-week-old twins being cradled by grown men wearing spiked helmets and loincloths.
"I heard they wanted to do their own barbecue sauce, so Brad, or I mean Jizmak, and Balzac came down to Juan's awhile back, and we scoped everything out," Rumaner continued. "And I figured, what better way is there to start a Gwar tour than here at Grinders, debuting the barbecue sauce? Did you get a sandwich? It's my meat, my rub, and Gwar's sauce."
"There's other stuff happening, too," Rumaner said. "There might be a Gwar Bar opening in Richmond. And they do a huge Gwar-B-Q gathering in Richmond every year, with food and music, and it's possible they might be bringing a second version to the Midwest."
An employee working the event came over. "The band wants Jäger shots," he said.
"Will you get a round of Jäger shots for the band?" Rumaner asked a passing waitress. "In plastic cups."
View original article: http://www.pitch.com/kansascity/streetside-gwar-b-q-grinders-april-2013/Content?oid=3194893

Stretching the Limits

Fri, 1 Mar 2013 10:16:03 -0600

435 Magazine March 2013
by: Andy Nelson
For Jeff Rumaner, the Kansas City, Mo.-based artist/restaurateur/TV personality better known as “Stretch,” art and food have always intertwined in interesting ways.
When he was a broke undergrad at the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1980s, Stretch found ways to eat on the cheap while getting around his dorm’s ban on cooking paraphernalia.
Irons, for example, doubled nicely as grills. And Stretch perfected the art of cooking hot dogs by sticking a nail in one end and copper wiring from the cord of an appliance in the other.
A quarter century on, Stretch still spends more than half of his waking hours thinking about or making art. His giant steel-and-glass sculptures and other creations can be found all over the Kansas City metro area and in New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Florida, Tennessee and other corners of the United States.
Stretch also is still cooking. The nail and the iron have been retired, but his Grinders restaurant in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District is famous for its creative fare.
Stretch founded Grinders and its sister deli next door, Grinders West, because he pined for the steak sandwiches of his Philadelphia youth and the thin pizza of New York City, where he lived and worked in the ’90s.
“It was kind of selfish,” he says. “I missed my East Coast foods. Some places in Kansas City had it, but it was a little pretentious. We needed a restaurant where people didn’t care what you looked like.”
In addition to Philly steaks, pizza and wings, Grinders is known for Stretch originals like chicken in waffles (as opposed to chicken and waffles), pizzaboli (half pizza, half stromboli), a half pastrami/half cheese steak sandwich and a barbecue cheese steak — “the only one I know of,” Stretch says.
On tap for this summer is the opening of a third Grinders in Lenexa. Grinders Roadhouse will take over the old Stonewall Pizza buildings near 103rd Street and Pflumm Road.
The westernmost of the three Stonewall buildings will house a bar, the other two, restaurants. And as with the original Grinders, the Johnson County version will feature live outdoor music.
In keeping with his food/art aesthetic, Stretch will dot the Stonewall property with his sculptures.
Grinders Roadhouse won’t be like either of his Crossroads eateries — quite.
“Grinders is rock ‘n’ roll, Grinders West is Huey Lewis and Grinders Roadhouse will be a fusion of the two,” he says.
Stretch has plans to open other versions of Grinders. How many, where and when he doesn’t know. Planning too far ahead isn’t really the Stretch way.
“I don’t have a game plan,” he says. “It just kind of evolves. I think that you should never be afraid to take a chance. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
What he can guarantee is that each Grinders will be unique, and that each will meet four “good” standards.
“Good food, good prices, good service and a good time,” he says. “It’s a pretty good philosophy to live by.”
Grinders Roundhouse isn’t the only Johnson County project on Stretch’s to-do list in 2013.
The year began with the conclusion of “Rooted in Real,” a show at the Bohemian Gallery in downtown Overland Park featuring Stretch and two other artists.
Also on tap for this year, the Lenexa City Council has green-lighted a unique reclamation project for its massive City Center development at 87th Street and Renner Road — a project born in the mind of Stretch.
He was driving through the intersection when he saw two roughly 80-foot pieces of metal lying on the ground. “Big” and “metal” is what Stretch the artist is all about, so he stopped to investigate.
The two pieces, it turned out, used to be one — a massive truss created to span 87th Street, inviting people into City Center. But it broke during installation and was slated for the junkyard.
Stretch convinced city officials the two pieces could be reconfigured as a single piece of art. Upright, they will conjure tusks, or maybe Kansas prairie grass, he says.
Plexiglas panels and LED lights that change colors will complete the work. Visible from Interstate 435, the sculpture would expose Stretch’s art to thousands of motorists daily.
Speaking of exposure, Stretch’s third identity — TV personality — also is looking forward to a busy 2013.
TV Stretch was born out of his twin loves of art and food.
Because his sculptures are so big and so heavy, whenever Stretch installs something, it demands attention.
As he puts it, when the cranes go up, the TV cameras aren’t far behind. And when the cameras roll and the reporters start asking their questions, the artist answering them isn’t exactly shy and retiring.
“I’m a guy who likes people and who knows how to talk about a lot of things — probably too much.”
Tattoos, pierced ears, gravity-defying hair and a handle like Stretch didn’t hurt, either. It all has translated into appearances on food-related shows like “Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives,” “Guy’s Big Bite” and “Food Paradise.”
On tap for 2013 are gigs on “BBQ Pitmasters” and “Pizza Paradise 2.” Stretch also recently hosted a show on Animal Planet, “Eating the Enemy,” in which he went in search of invasive species to kill, cook and eat.
Another of Stretch’s food-related adventures finds him traveling the world with America’s Chefs, cooking for U.S. troops.
But he’ll likely have to cut back soon on that and other projects. In March, Stretch and his wife, Rebecca, owner of the Crossroads-based Beco Flowers, will welcome twins.
So how will being a dad times two fit into the Stretch schedule?
“I’ve always been energetic,” he says. “I’ve always slept about five and a half, six hours a night. It’ll be a juggling act, but my dogs travel with me everywhere I go, so why not the kids?"
photo: Paul Versluis

Read original article here: http://www.435southmag.com/March-2013/Stretching-the-Limits/

LIVE from Jaspers Kitchen KCMO Radio

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 11:00:29 -0600

Jasper Mirabile & Kimberly Stern talk with Aaron Sanchez & STRETCH.
Get updated on Grinders, food, TV & the latest in the world of STRETCH (begins at 45:00).

LISTEN TO PODCAST HERE: February 16th, 2013 episode
http://www.kcmotalkradio.com/common/page.php?pt=Jasper%27s+Kitchen+Podcasts&id=501&is_corp=0&section_id=121

For more about Jasper Mirabile: http://www.jasperskc.com/