Mama's House

A couple of generations ago, when many neighborhood drugstores had lunch counters, a Kansas Citian never had to walk very far from home to get a good cheap meal. Cheap and, apparently, memorable. The jazz singer Queen Bey still lights up when she talks about the hot dogs at the downtown Woolworth's. And my friend Thelma raves about the open-faced turkey sandwich ("with lots of yellow gravy") she ate at Kresge's Five and Dime on the Plaza fifty years ago and the fluffy pancakes at the Katz Drug Store counter.

But suburban sprawl and the proliferation of fast-food outlets helped kill off counter culture. That and the automobile. Who the hell wanted to walk to the dinky neighborhood dinette for a quick meal when you could hop in the Buick and get a cheaper, paper-wrapped cheeseburger at McDonald's or a bucket of bird at Kentucky Fried Chicken? And no tipping necessary!

Today it's the rare urban neighborhood that still has a drugstore within walking distance, let alone a place to get a cheese omelet. That's what makes a joint like Bell Street Mama's so unusual. It's not just a throwback to a time when this town was loaded with unassuming mom-and-pop diners; it is a mom-and-pop operation, with "Mama" Jan Imber getting top billing over her partner, Ira Auerbach.

The seven-year-old restaurant doesn't have a counter, but it does have all the other qualities of a diner that's been around forever. The kitchen serves breakfast all day, the coffee is as strong and jolting as coal oil, smokers aren't persecuted, and Mama can either warm up to you and talk your head off or get pissed off and give you a piece of her mind. (If she's really angry, she'll let one of her regular customers do it for her.)

Like the time she stepped out of the dining room and chided a noncustomer for parking in one of the few coveted spaces she leases in front of the tiny strip center her restaurant shares with a liquor store and a laundromat. The noncustomer called her a dirty name, and before Mama could respond, Tommy Macaluso (who runs his own restaurant down the street) had jumped up from his breakfast and chased the man away, cursing like a sailor.

"This place is like a TV sitcom, but even better," says Auerbach, who oversees the kitchen. The place seems full of possible story lines -- the one about the customer who left his bag of crack on his seat (Auerbach called the cops) or, more poignantly, the one about the dying AIDS patient who called Imber one morning asking for a home-cooked meal. "She was right out the door with a big basket of food," Auerbach says. And their customers tend to remember such kindnesses. After Imber had quadruple-bypass surgery two years ago, the place was filled with flowers from customers.

Imber, who spent thirty years working as a hairdresser, got the nickname "Mama Jan" when she ran her first restaurant, the Santa Fe Café in Overland Park, 15 years ago. "I had all these kids working for me, latchkey kids, and I'd insist on seeing their report cards," she says. "If the grades weren't good, I cut their hours. They still call me Mama." And she still cuts their hair.

Imber and Auerbach briefly ran another Johnson County restaurant, José's, before opening the Bell Street operation in 1997. "We fell in love with this neighborhood," Imber says. "It's not just the coolest neighborhood, but the kids who come in here are better mannered, better tippers and much more respectful than the younger customers we had over on the Kansas side."

It's easy for me to be a well-mannered good tipper at Bell Street Mama's, but that's because I like the joint. And I know people who are so passionate about the place that they're oblivious to its chaotic décor, its frenetic service and some of the less-lovable dishes on the menu. "It's an old-fashioned diner," says my friend Karen. "You can't expect perfection." I don't, but I have other friends who find the restaurant's imperfections too disturbing. "It's a dirty, creepy dump," says one, who refuses to return. "And the fried chicken is the worst in the city. "

The worst? No. The best? No. Somewhere in the middle, I think. Auerbach coats his juicy, tender bird in a blend of corn and white flours, which gives it a lot of crunch. But for fried-chicken purists like me, slightly grainy corn flour makes a better breading for catfish than for chicken. And it works wonderfully for Auerbach's fabulous fried catfish fillets, boneless and served with homemade hush puppies and a big pile of fries. Both dinners have graduated from erratic specials to regular slots on Mama's new menu, which also adds Auerbach's big slab of meatloaf and ups the number of designer omelets from 51 to 66.

That meatloaf was excellent on the night I had dinner with my friend Jeanne and her two fussy daughters, despite an oddly tough crust that Jeanne preferred to slice off rather than eat. Alexandra thought the fried chicken salad, made with strips of the corny fried bird, was "totally delicious," but her older sister, a vegetable-phobic teenager, would only nibble on a grilled cheese sandwich. And both girls looked aghast when they saw the matzo ball soup that their mother and I ordered and quickly devoured.