Case Closed

Call Nancy Drew! Telegraph the Hardy Boys! There's a mystery waiting to be solved at Leawood's Town Center Plaza. A restaurant there is seemingly cursed, despite many noble attempts to turn it into a crowd pleaser. Its location seems great -- the free-standing building, built in 1998 to house The Uptown Café, was designed with beaconlike conspicuousness in mind (especially its glowing neon clock). But the one thing it hasn't lured over the past six years has been customers.

Not that a lot of big names haven't tried. The Uptown Café was the first expansion effort for a Branson-based family-style restaurant that didn't serve alcohol. In less than a year, Hereford House Restaurants had taken over and, not surprisingly, added booze to the menu. Leawood might be a bedroom community, but it's not a teetotaling town.

After two years, though, the Hereford House's Rod Anderson realized he couldn't make the 1950s-style diner click. "For one thing, it was a dining room that had 220 seats, and you saw all of them the minute you walked into the restaurant," he says. "When the place was full, it rocked. But when it was half empty, you could fire a cannon through it and not hit anyone."

When Anderson pulled out in 2000, another Kansas City restaurant operation, KC Hopps Ltd. (the 75th Street Brewery, Barley's Brewhaus, the Blue Moose) took over and named it the Uptown Diner. That incarnation lasted until the fall of 2002. Out went the retro theme and the trashy, purple-blue exterior. When KC Hopps once again opened the stainless-steel-and-glass doors last April, the venue had been completely revamped and repainted (in tastefully bland taupe) as the dark and clubby Fenton's Bar and Grill.

No, the restaurant wasn't named for the fictional Fenton Hardy, the "internationally famous detective" and father of those lovable teenage crime-solvers the Hardy Boys. Solving yet another mystery, it has no connection to another Johnson County restaurant named Fenton's, which used to serve roasted chicken and corn chowder at 151st Street and Metcalf. That other Fenton's, named for restaurateur Fenton Barnard, closed at about the same time that the Uptown Café opened. This newest Fenton's was named for septuagenarian Jim Fenton, the first regular customer at the 75th Street Brewery. Such a touching gesture. I practically wept.

Remind me, if I ever open my own restaurant, to name it Two Chubby Blond Girls, after my first regular customers when I waited tables at a now-closed midtown restaurant. Alas, I lost touch with those Rubenesque babes after I was fired, though I recall that they liked to drink martinis, very dry, with an olive and a pickled onion. Eerily, that's just what my friend Bob ordered at Fenton's when he discovered that Thursday nights featured two-buck martinis.

We had barely squeezed into a booth when our server, Leo, announced the drink special. Food and mystery writer Lou Jane Temple, joining us on our adventure, immediately snapped to attention. "Two-dollar martinis? I'll have one, too."

How things have changed from the innocent days of 1998, when this venue served only lemonade and chocolate malts. Now the bar permits smoking and offers drink specials nearly every night. Bob and Lou Jane were so delighted by the cheap martinis that they downed several, putting them in the happiest of moods. And when Bob heard that the Thursday night dinner special was a $12 Kansas City strip, his cup ran over.

Maybe it was because I wasn't drinking, but I didn't see anything on the menu -- which boasts a lot of the same dishes you see on other KC Hopps-owned restaurants -- that really turned me on. Even the appetizer assortment was a rerun of the stuff you'd see at the 75th Street Brewery or the Blue Moose: chicken nachos, spinach-artichoke dip, Bavarian pretzels.

The Tabasco Onion Rings sounded novel, so we ordered them, along with the Four-Cheese Spinach Artichoke Dip, from the charming but perpetually flustered Leo. The lightly battered onion rings were a delicate pink, thanks to a healthy dose of fiery Tabasco sauce that gave them a distinct kick. But the dip was predictably dull: cheesy, yes, but with artichokes chopped so finely that they'd practically disappeared. And though the menu bragged that the concoction would be "served with our homemade tortilla chips," it arrived alongside a pile of disturbingly psychedelic corn chips in shades of candy-apple red and acid green.

Leo had asked us whether we wanted our salads before dinner. Of course we did, but when mine arrived it might as well have been an unpleasant main course -- the Caesar was so overdressed that even calling it a salad was a stretch. It was a romaine casserole! Things didn't improve for me at dinner, when I had to make do with the virtually taste-free Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella Pasta, twisty noodles tossed with chunks of flavorless yellow and red tomatoes and cherry-sized balls of milky mozzarella.

Bob's steak, on the other hand, was a decently grilled and juicy 12-ounce strip, sided by hot, creamy mashed potatoes. Even better were Lou Jane's meaty, falling-off-the-bone barbecued pork ribs, slathered with a dark but profoundly sweet sauce.