K.C.-based Mexican restaurant coming to old Carlos O’Kelly’s spot; food truck battle may be brewing; study finds Lawrence not very average

In March, when I delivered the sad news of the closing of Carlos O’Kelly’s on 23rd Street, we left my lovely wife soaking in a vat of cheese sauce and repeatedly whispering “Vaya con Dios, Suiza con Pollo.” Well, I may soon be able to put the vat to other uses. No, Carlos O’Kelly’s isn’t coming back, but a Kansas City-based Mexican restaurant is moving in.

Permits have been filed at Lawrence City Hall for Mi Ranchito to take over the spot at 707 W. 23rd St. It also looks like remodeling work has begun at the site. I’ve got a call into the company’s corporate offices in Lenexa to get more information, but at the moment, I’ll just have to describe the restaurant based on my vast knowledge of the Spanish language. Obviously it will be a ranch-themed venture combining the influences of World Cup soccer star Mia Hamm and O.J. Simpson judge Lance Ito.

Actually, I’m told that is not correct and that we have changed decades. I’m sure many of you already have been to a Mi Ranchito. According to the company’s website, Mi Ranchito opened its first restaurant in 2004 in Olathe and has grown to six locations including in Lenexa, Overland Park and Gladstone. It looks like the Lawrence location will be its first outside the Kansas City metro.

According to its online menu, it looks like the restaurant will have a large offering of Mexican dishes — combination platters, fajitas, burritos, shrimp tacos, guacamole, and of course, salads served in the only respectable type of salad bowl, a crispy flour tortilla bowl.

When I hear back from the company, I’ll pass along more details about when the restaurants plans to open and other such details.

In other news and notes from around town:

• While were on the subject of restaurants, I’m hearing that some restaurant owners will find their way to Lawrence City Hall next week to debate the proposal related to loosening the regulations for food truck operations. As we previously reported, the city is considering removing the restriction that a food truck can operate for no more three hours at any one location. The new proposal would allow food trucks to operate an unlimited number of hours in properly zoned, private parking lots, as long as they meet some basic site guidelines. Commissioners earlier in the month delayed action on the new regulations, in part because Commissioner Bob Schumm said he thought traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant owners may have some concerns once they became more familiar with the proposal. Schumm told me he has indeed heard from several restaurant owners, so we’ll see what type of debate ensues. The food truck regulations are tentatively scheduled to be heard at Tuesday’s City Commission meeting.

• It would seem that Mexican restaurants and food truck battles would make us a typical All-American city, but a new study says that Lawrence isn’t all that typical when compared to other American metro areas.

The financial website WalletHub.com has put out a new study that tries to examine how each major metro area compares to the national average. In other words, the study looks at the national average of things such as age, race, income, and education, and then tries to determine which metro areas are most and least similar to the averages.

Lawrence lands on the list of cities that aren’t much like America as a whole. Lawrence was ranked No. 351 out of 366 metro areas. In other words, 350 other communities were closer to the “average American community” than we were.

But that may not be all that bad. One of the big reasons that Lawrence doesn’t stack up with an average community is because the education levels of Lawrence residents are much higher than the national average. Using Census data, the study found that the average educational attainment level of Lawrence residents was well above the national average. In fact, only three metro areas — Provo, Utah; Ithaca, N.Y.; and Boulder, Colo. — were found to have average education levels higher than Lawrence’s. That’s no surprise. Local leaders for more than a decade have been touting Lawrence as one of the more highly educated communities in the country. We have lots of people with advanced degrees and we call lots of them “professor.”

The more interesting finding to me is the data that shows just how young Lawrence’s population is. Obviously, college communities are going to be younger than the average American community, but Lawrence is really young even for a college town. Only Provo was younger than Lawrence. I had seen statistics that had suggested that before. (Hey, I’m a journalist in a very smart town, so I obviously spend all my free time looking at statistics.) I’m not sure what to make of that. I think we perhaps would like to not be ranked quite that young in the future. If our average age could rise a little bit, I think that would be an indication that we’re doing a better job of keeping graduates in our community rather than watching their considerable brain power leave directly upon graduation.

The study found Lawrence also has a really low housing tenure compared to the national average, which is just another way of saying people move a lot in Lawrence.

Interestingly, the study found that a very close cousin of ours appears to be Manhattan. Lawrence ranked No. 351 on the list and Manhattan ranked No. 350. Demographically, we’re pretty similar.

Kansas City is the nearby community that is most like the average. It’s No. 23 on the list, and scores particularly high in having a racial make-up that is most like the American average. It is No. 4 in that category. Wichita also scores high on the list of being an average American place. (That makes sense. Every average community has the one of the world’s 10 wealthiest men.) Wichita ranked No. 36 on the list. Topeka ranked No. 113.

The community that is most unlike the average American city is McAllen, Texas. I don’t know anything about McAllen, but our good friend Boulder, Colo., was next in line for being most unlike an average American city.

As far as which city is most like the average American place, that would be . . . Nashville, Tenn. As a viewer of the popular primetime soap opera “Nashville,” I find that very reassuring. Surely this means you’ll soon all join me in my fashion choice of wearing cowboy boots everyday, and we all can meet at a cafe with our guitars, write four hit songs in an hour, and then go back to flying around the country on our private jets. Average is going to be great.