In the glory days of the midtown hotel formerly known as the Hyatt Regency Crown Center (it became a Sheraton property earlier this year), the venue operated three successful restaurants — actually four if you counted the sports bar, currently called Spectators. Two of the hotel's restaurants were upscale, even glamorous dining rooms: Skies and the Peppercorn Duck Club. The less expensive restaurant in the Hyatt was The Terrace, which once served breakfast, lunch and dinner and a wildly popular Sunday brunch.
"People would stand in line — it would snake down through the first-floor lobby — to get into that brunch," recalls a friend of mine, a former server at The Terrace. "It was a gigantic brunch. There were ice sculptures, a musician from the Conservatory playing the harp, and the longest chocolate dessert bar in the city. This was in the 1980s when the Hyatt was the newest, grooviest hotel in the city."
Note: Recently, Pitch employee Payton Hatfield — an unabashed meat lover with a bacon tattoo — completed a culinary experiment: He became a vegan. For a month. This is his story, in his own words.
My routine had been simple: Stay out late drinking whiskey and water, smoke too many cigarettes, eat deep-fried meats daily. When I decided that maybe I could live a little healthier, someone recommended that I watch the documentary Forks Over Knives. So I put it on one night, a plate of fried eggs and bacon in front of me. In one hand, I held a beer. I figured the movie would offer me a few tips I could take or leave.
What it did was fuck up my life.
I can rattle off the names of the ones that I remember: Pi Cappuccino, Cantata Cafe, the Supreme Bean, Crave Cafe, Javanaut. Each of them, no matter how short-lived, had a distinctive personality. But Mud Pie was a completely new incarnation: a casual and utterly un-corporate coffee and snack shop (as different from the Starbucks right down the street as Rooney Mara is from, say, Callista Gingrich) that served both vegan and gluten-free pastries. It was a unique niche for any bakery in the city, but could it support Hughes and the Valverde family (daughter Ella was 18 months old when her parents and grandmother opened the business)?
The answer has been a resounding yes.
The legendary Madonna proved at last night's Super Bowl XLVI half-time show that one really can look young, limber and sexy at age 53. Not so true, alas, of the two KC-area Waid's restaurants. In fact, the Prairie Village Shopping Center location at 6920 Mission — which appears to have been last redecorated back when Madonna's debut album was released — has such an air of shabby sadness to it that I'm starting to wonder if this old-fashioned diner has much of a future. After all, two stylish new restaurant operations — Tavern in the Village and Story — opened in Prairie Village Shopping Center last year. Hasn't the badly dated Waid's become almost an anachronism for the shopping district?
"We're on a month-to-month lease," whispered one of the servers to me on a recent visit to the restaurant. "We're really only busy anymore on Saturday and Sunday mornings."
So when they launch their sandwich shop, Heavy Soul, or are appearing on next year's run of Top Chef, kindly remember you read it here first.
Fat City's Jonathan Bender certainly has the last word on the controversial "Meatless in the Midwest" essay by A.G. Sulzberger that ran in this week's New York Times. The most interesting thing, for me anyway, was Sulzberger's claim that Kansas City's Aladdin Cafe at 3903 Wyoming served "the best lentil soup I've ever had."
Last night was bitterly cold, and I didn't have the energy to go out to eat or cook at home. So I stopped by the Aladdin Cafe for takeout. Because of the New York Times plug, I wondered if the dining room would be filled with people eating lentil soup. Not so, but it was early, and the folks in the one occupied booth in the first-floor dining room didn't have soup at all! I paid for my two Styrofoam cups of soup and a couple of sandwiches and drove home, where I immediately dumped the soup into china bowls. I don't give a damn how good the soup tasted: I won't eat from Styrofoam dishware. (It did look much more appealing in a vintage Noritake pattern.)
Well, they can be. I've yet to taste any preparation for lima beans that disguises the starchy quality of this New World legume. Not even succotash. I have friends who love spinach salads but won't taste cooked spinach. And it wasn't that long ago when the traditional vegetable offering on most restaurant menus was canned corn, canned green beans ... or french fries.
Tomorrow's edition of the food critics' panel of The Walt Bodine Show (co-hosted by yours truly) on KCUR 89.3 will take on the subject, "Vegetables That Aren't Boring." The show is broadcast at 10 a.m. and should be a lively because everybody loves at least one vegetable.
The interesting thing about researching this week's Pitch Cafe feature about Kansas City's finest pancakes was the discovery that most area restaurants, even first-class restaurants like Chaz on the Plaza in the Raphael Hotel, don't use real maple syrup, but serve maple-flavored corn syrup.
Actually, in defense of Chaz, chef Charles d'Ablaing uses a 50-50 blend of real maple syrup and corn syrup, which tastes very close to the real thing. "The reason that most restaurants don't offer pure maple syrup," d'Ablaing says, "is the expense. The costs of pure Vermont maple syrup are now running between $50 to $80 a gallon."
"You can buy five times as much maple-flavored syrup these days as 1 gallon of pure syrup," chef Marshall Roth says. "It's all a matter of economy."
Interestingly, one of the last restaurants I expected to be serving real maple syrup was suggested by one of the commenters to this week's story: Commenter Celeste Lindell said Tennessee-based restaurant chain Cracker Barrel serves the real stuff. I was wary, but the manager of the Cracker Barrel at 7920 N.W. Tiffany Springs Pkwy. confirmed that the dining room uses pure maple syrup.
Who knew?
Milk & Honey has the best I've had in KC. http://milkandhoneykc.com/
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