Moose on the Loose

There's more than one reason Rocky and Bullwinkle come to mind when I think about the two-month-old Blue Moose Bar & Grill in Prairie Village. Yes, eating there felt as if I were stuck in an episode of the old cartoon, but that's not all. I can't seem to shake the sense that this restaurant is really a setting for one of that show's "Fractured Fairy Tales." In the case of the Blue Moose, it's the Cinderella story in reverse.

In the traditional fairy tale, Cinderella is a pretty but ragged scullery maid who turns into a sumptuously clad princess. In the fractured -- but true -- story, the elegantly designed restaurant called the Mosaic Bistro, which certainly had aspirations toward grandeur ("Arts and Drafts," January 18, 2001), is stripped of its stylish menu and artistic interior and becomes a sports bar. And because every fairy tale needs a touch of irony, the Blue Moose is vastly more popular than the prettier but snootier Mosaic.

I might not be able to write a TV script about the charms of the Blue Moose, but I could certainly write a better phony legend than the nonsense on the restaurant's menu. There, a mysterious "7-foot-tall darkish blue beast with huge antlers" has supposedly been "wandering the streets and parks" of suburban Prairie Village since the hamlet was "first settled." Diners aren't sure whether the blueberry-colored beast was a deadly Sasquatch or a shy recluse like Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. But judging from the blue-eyed moose (which boasts six interchangeable sets of googly eyes, including a bloodshot pair for Sunday mornings) mounted above the dining room's brick fireplace, Prairie Village's fictitious moose is bull, not Bullwinkle. Besides, Prairie Village was "settled" by returning GIs building their little ranch houses on farmland fifty years ago. The only real mystery is how the town, which is only 6.1 square miles, has survived so long with so few good restaurants.

Things have taken a turn for the better since Patrick Quillec opened Café Provence in the Prairie Village Shopping Center last year. If the Blue Moose doesn't have the continental savoir faire of Quillec's establishment, it has enough savvy to understand its community: young families and well-off retirees, predominantly white and middle-class, with a fondness for unfussy food. One night's dinner special included the simmered eggplant side dish known as ratatouille. The harried waiter seemed shocked when our group didn't need him to tell us what it was. "You're the first table I've had tonight that's even heard of it," he said.

I wonder how many regular members of the Moose mob have heard of fried pickles, the restaurant's signature appetizer. This offbeat dish was invented either in 1960 in an Arkansas drive-in or in 1969 at a Mississippi diner, depending on which story you believe. The kind served in Kansas in 2002 are papery slices coated with a thick, pillowy fried batter made from unfiltered wheat beer -- and their popularity proves my point: Kansans will eat anything if it's deep-fried. There's so little pickle in these crunchy batter puffs that I'll bet even kids will favor them over the menu's less exotic options.

In fact, despite its sports-bar motif, the Blue Moose practically kowtows to the toddler set. While waiting for dinner one night, I watched two frazzled mothers and half a dozen high-strung brats take over a nearby table. I cringed at the same moment the elderly gentleman in the booth directly across from me cringed -- but he was sipping a Manhattan, which takes the sting off of any nuisance. Fortunately for us, a quick-thinking young server hit the kiddie table with the speed and agility of a marathon runner. He took a dinner order before the tots could crank up their whining and arrived back at the table loaded down with pizza, corn dogs and creamy-looking macaroni and cheese. Hoorah!

That lucky night, I had arrived before 6 p.m. for an early dinner. On my next Moose call, however, I learned the hard way that the place becomes a madhouse after 6 and that it's common to wait an hour before snagging a table. And that's if the perky hostess doesn't accidentally scratch your name from the waiting list before your pager goes off.

It was a rainy night, and rather than spend a grueling hour in the loud and smoky bar, we begged to sit on the damp, cool patio (from which a number of patrons had fled during an earlier downpour). We were advised we would be sitting there at our own risk, but a typhoon seemed preferable to the pounding beat playing over the sound system.

My friends Robert and Donna had already eaten at the restaurant once and had been wholly unimpressed. But they were game to give it another try. "The spinach artichoke dip is good," Donna advised when we finally sat down. It turned out to be an average version of the ubiquitous concoction, heavy on both cheese and spinach. At least it was far superior to the horrifying vegetarian egg rolls, whose fried won ton wrappers enclosed unidentifiable, curry-flavored vegetables that had been boiled down to a waterlogged clay.