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Over the past 15 years, our paths would intersect in the strangest places, such as QuikTrip parking lots at midnight and, at the lowest point in both of our culinary careers, a brief stint working together yet again at a greasy pancake restaurant. I still have nightmares about that joint and its unpleasant customers, who were also the worst tippers ever. They never left more than 50 cents and often paid in pennies! When I quit, I spilled ten bucks' worth of copper on the sticky floor and never looked back.
The day Ronald Reagan died, I looked up from my menu at CC's City Broiler and saw Brenda. I thought she had gotten out of the life, but there she was in the traditional server costume of white shirt and black pants, her spotless black apron embroidered with the CC's City Broiler logo.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, looking shocked.
"What are you doing here?" I answered.
What were we both doing way out at 151st Street and Antioch, in a strip-center restaurant across the street from a warehouse-sized Baptist church? It was curiosity that had driven me to visit the first Kansas satellite of a steakhouse based in Columbia, Missouri. A few weeks earlier, I'd been dining in a very good Columbia restaurant, Trattoria Strada Nova, when my friend Bob asked the waitress what other local restaurants she considered excellent places to eat. She recommended CC's City Broiler, which sounded like a seedy diner -- perhaps one inspired by the cheating heroine of the Chuck Willis song "C.C. Rider."
But in Overland Park, at least, this seven-month-old steakhouse isn't what you think it's going to be at all. The free-standing restaurant is plunked down in the middle of a busy yet visually dreary strip mall, but owner Scott Cleeton -- who regularly makes a 3-hour commute to and from Columbia -- has paid a lot of attention to all the little details. At dinner, the tables are swathed in linen and set with fresh flowers in pressed-glass vases, white linen napkins, shiny flatware and heavy water tumblers. But despite the upscale prices and stylish decorative details, it's not a formal place. No one in the restaurant batted an eyelash when Bob showed up in shorts and flip-flops. And he wasn't the only customer dressed so casually.
"Darling, this is Johnson County," Lou Jane whispered. "They don't dress up out here."
CC's City Broiler takes its fashion cues from the privately owned steak joints of the 1950s rather than from its frenetic and successful suburban contemporaries, such as the Florida-based Outback Steakhouse chain or the Atlanta-based LongHorn Steakhouse franchise. The musical soundtrack, culled straight from the Your Hit Parade era, helps deceive diners, too. When you're listening to Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee as you sip a Manhattan or nibble on a chilled shrimp cocktail, it's easier to imagine that Ronnie Reagan is still an actor and people are eating steaks because they like them, not because of some low-carb diet.
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