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Nor has Kansas City's culinary world embraced its French heritage; we prefer a simple grilled steak and fried potatoes to boeuf bourguignon and pommes frites. French toast, french fries, French vanilla ice cream and French kissing are all well and good, but until recently, Kansas City has had a love-hate relationship with traditional French cuisine.
In the 1970s, you could find crepes, omelets, quiche and French onion soup on dozens of local menus, including those of the least cosmopolitan joints, such as Houlihan's (which even served escargot in those days), the long-vanished Putsch's Sidewalk Café, Papa Nick's and the Arrowhead Inn. When those dishes fell out of fashion, they were sent to the guillotine, sharing the fates of once-stylish "continental" restaurants located in hotels: Le Jardin (Glenwood Manor Motor Hotel), La Tour En Rond (the downtown Holiday Inn) and Le Carrousel (the Muehlebach Hotel). Au revoir, crepes! Hello, salad bars!
But the constantly spinning cycle of culinary trends revives restaurant concepts every few decades. What baby boomer would have guessed that fondue would become hot again? (The Florida-based Melting Pot Restaurant opens on the Plaza later this month.) And Kansas City is undergoing a French-restaurant renaissance, though not one favoring the "fancy" kind (such as the defunct La Mediterranean, with waiters in tuxedo shirts and dishes prepared flambe on rolling carts). This new breed of French dining rooms -- Café des Amis, Aixois and the three-month-old Café Provence -- features fare inspired by the cuisine of Provence, the Southern province of France where garlic, tomatoes and olive oil are the favored ingredients. It was there, in the coastal city of Marseilles, where the sumptuous fish stew known as bouillabaisse was reportedly invented.
Café Provence serves a robust bouillabaisse, fragrant with garlic and saffron and packed with pieces of monkfish, bass, mussels and potatoes. It's a classic Provencal dish, even if the restaurant's owner, chef Patrick Quillec (who also owns the more eclectic Hannah Bistro), is a native of Brittany, way over on the Atlantic side of the country.
"I try not to let too much Brittany slip into the menu," Quillec confesses. "I'm saving that cooking style for another restaurant, a creperie that I plan to open in the future."
Café Provence resembles its Parisian cousins more closely than Kansas City's other new French bistros. In fact, if Café Provence had ashtrays on its tables and patrons smoking (the restaurant is smoke-free), it could easily pass as a double of Paris' trendy L'Epi Dupin -- one located instead in the not-quite-glamorous parking lot that bisects the Prairie Village Shopping Center. A window table provides no romantic view (unless suburban shoppers wheeling baby carriages turns you on), but the petite dining room, with its white woodwork, linen-draped tables and lace curtains, is exceptionally attractive.
Less attractive was my run-in with a tyrannical French-born hostess, who immediately waged war against me. For my first dinner at the restaurant, I had made an early reservation for deux, and the dining room was empty but for one other table. Madame gave me a hostile once-over (was it my denim jacket?) and ushered us straight to the worst spot in the room, a tiny table for two pushed up against the wall in a dark corner near the restrooms. I said, "This table will not do."
