For several months, passersby at Lenexa City Center peered curiously at the former Savoy Tea Co. space on their way to neighboring shops or restaurants.
Inside, Samir Shura, Dipti Bhakta and Benjamin Davalos were busy making the space their own. Now, black walls, gold accents, lots of plants and leather couches fill the space; and drinks are once again pouring, but it’s not tea this time.
The trio recently opened their new cocktail bar, Neat, in Lenexa; an opening that they say has already been met enthusiastically by the surrounding community.
Neat opened at 16953 City Center Drive
- The cocktail bar occupies a space at Lenexa City Center, near Pure Barre and BODY20.
- Savoy Tea Co. occupied that space for roughly five years before closing in the spring of 2025.
- Neat’s regular hours are 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 4 p.m. to midnight Thursday and Friday, and 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday.
Neat serves “globally inspired” craft cocktails
Davalos, who leads Neat’s bar program, said the menu is shaped less by trends and more by his own experiences — whether that be travel, music, conversations and the people he’s met behind the bar.
“All of my drinks tend to have a theme, and they tend to be circled around the experiences that you can gain from life,” he said. “Life is such a varied and diverse thing to experience. So I feel like I have no shortage of creative capability.”
One menu standout so far is the “Gun for Hire”, an espresso martini-meets-old fashioned style cocktail that reminds Davalos of early days behind the bar.
Another current fan favorite, the “Dolce Vita”, pulls from Davalos’ travels in Italy and France, where he fell for what he describes as an “almond-and-orange creamsicle” flavor. At Neat, he aimed to recreate that in a shaken cocktail with Grand Marnier, Aperol, Italian amaretto, citrus and a touch of saline to sharpen and soften flavors (the same way that salt works in cooking).
As for the space itself, husband-and-wife team Shura and Bhakta led the redesign effort, aiming for a space that felt both polished and approachable.
Bhakta describes the style as “vintage modern” — not quite a tucked-away speakeasy, but also not the type of sprawling, glass-and-steel cocktail bar commonly seen in big coastal cities.
“It’s just a blend of both that really is inviting,” she said. “This is like we’re inviting you to our home to have an experience.”
The owners wanted to fill a gap in the local market
Bhakta, Shura and Davalos all bring a different piece of the puzzle to Neat. Bhakta handles PR and community-facing work, while Shura oversees the business side (from inventory to operations) and Davalos leads the bar program.
The three of them have long discussed and scouted potential locations for their concept, and though the Kansas City metro area has no shortage of cocktail bars, they ultimately found that there wasn’t anything quite like it in Lenexa.
Until now, Shura said, anyone looking for a high-end cocktail experience in Johnson County typically had to leave Lenexa for it, heading south to Olathe or north to Shawnee or Mission. Not anymore.
“(Customers) are like, ‘You know, we’ve been dying for something like this in here,’” Shura said. “It cultivates the nightlife.”
To Bhakta, being able to give those customers the thing they’ve been looking (and waiting) for feels like the biggest reward of Neat’s opening.
“Honestly, for me, it’s just seeing the joy on people’s faces,” she said. “From the minute they walk in to the minute they leave, they just have so much appreciation for us being here, and that’s just brought us so much joy because we love serving this community.”
For Davalos, who has spent about a decade in the bar world (in Kansas City and beyond), Neat represents a full-circle culmination of that work.
“It really feels like coming home to myself,” Davalos said. “All the different perspectives, different philosophies that I’ve been inspired by from my peers, different concepts, just different restaurateurs — all of them, you know, distilled or filtered into one singular location.”
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