By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Two years ago, The Pitch named Cassis, chef Patrick Quillec's bistro in Leawood's Town Center Plaza, the Best New Restaurant in Kansas City. This week the restaurant's phone service was disconnected.

Quillec has reportedly left town (he didn't return messages left on his cell phone). Quillec, who has opened a number of restaurants in the metro area since his first success, Hannah Bistro Cafe, in 1998, closed nearly as many.

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By OWEN MORRIS

In the Pitch Forks newsletter early this week I hinted at it but I'll come out right here and say it: Weston's Irish Fest is the best event in Kansas City.

Bar none. It's the only one that combines authenticity, alcohol, good music and a sense of adventure into one package. I'm not the only one who feels this way. KC Beer Blog has also called it the best Irish Fest and event in town

The festival start today (Friday) at 5 p.m. and officially goes until midnight. Since Weston is a little bit of a drive from the metro area, I recommend avoiding the rush traffic Friday and instead getting up and going early Saturday and making a day of it. The only problem is that the closest hotel to O'Malley's Pub is St. George and it looks to be full. (The event's official hotel is the Comfort Inn in nearby Platte City.) You can always call and beg check to see if there have been cancellations. Otherwise pick a designated driver who can withstand ten hours of being around delicious beer and is able to dance jigs sober.

Saturday's hours are 11 a.m. to midnight and Sunday's hours are noon to 10 p.m. Tickets are $10 both Saturday and Sunday and $8 Friday. The main action takes place in the cellars of O'Malley's Pub at 500 Welt Street though you can park anywhere in Weston and easily walk to the pub.

Have fun and see you there! (If not, see you Monday!)

By OWEN MORRIS

Yesterday I posted an article about fast-food chili. While researching the article, I wanted to call Steak n' Shake and ask them a few questions about the history of the chili. To find a Steak n' Shake phone number I visited its Web site -- and was more than a little surprised to see just how plain it was. It was designed in the (early) ages of web 1.0. Here's an Internet Archive link to what the page looked like in 1998, and essentially, it hasn't changed.

Call me an Internet snob, but I was actually shocked that a publicly held restaurant chain like Steak n' Shake would have such a pedestrian site. It did, however, have all the relevant information that any normal customer could want (minus a damn press-office phone number), including store locations, menus and nutritional info.

Actually, it was preferable to a high tech gee-whiz site like the Olive Garden's, where the site map lists about twenty links too many but not a single one to nutritional info. Turns out it's because the Olive Garden doesn't list that information on its menu or like, anywhere.

My curiosity sparked, I looked around and the only chain I could find, comparable in size to Steak n' Shake and with a simpler layout, was Taco Time, a fast-food burrito chain with 250 restaurants in the West. Like Steak n' Shake, the information is there -- it's just not presented very attractively. However, one Taco Time franchisee in Washington made a Web site that made it clear how much more presentable the exact same information can look.

Does it really matter what a restaurant's Web site looks like? I think so -- and so does McDonald's, which realized the power of the Internet with its "I'm Lovin' It" campaign. Here's McDonald's Web site the month before the I'm Loving It campaign started. One month later the entire Web site was redesigned to what it is today. Meanwhile, the most buzz any restaurant advertisement has generated in recent years came not from a television commercial but from a Web site; Burger King's Subservient Chicken.

Web sites should be like menus: cool, up-to-date, with no contrasting colors, leaving customers hungry to eat the food.

By OWEN MORRIS

If you're like me, you often say to yourself, "Man, I'd love to cook up some testicles right now, but I just don't know whether to marinate or grill them."

Fear no more. For what is apparently the world's first cookbook on testicles has recently come out. "The Testicle Cookbook" is subtitled "Cooking with Balls."

It gets even better! This is an E-Cookbook, which means that you can download it right now, complete with videos, and be serving Oysters a la Rocky Mountain for dinner tonight.

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By OWEN MORRIS

Venus in the Kitchen follows her 10 Kansas City foods to eat before you die post with a 10 foods I never want to see again post. I have to say it's a divisive list and you may be surprised to see some of your favorite foods on there like (for me) olives and nuts. Good job creating controversy but dammit, olives are good! (Venus in the Kitchen)

A slowing economy doesn't mean we should stop spending -- it means we should spend more wisely. For instance, here's a list of 15 great wines under 15 bones. Take a broader hint and notice all the Chileans on the list. That's because they're dirt cheap and really good right now. (Like Spanish ones were five years ago.) (Forbes)

So close to a miracle and yet so far. Chilled sparkling wine started flowing through water taps in Marino, Italy, just south of Rome. While locals initially explained the phenomenon as a sign from the main Signore, it turned out to be a plumbing error. I'll make a bet that this plumbing error just "happened" to plumb the wine right to the plumber's house. (Telegraph)

The bad news keeps coming. First the recession and now this! (Economist)

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Long before I became a professional restaurant reviewer -- in fact, when I was so dead broke that I was washing clothes in my sink -- I still ate at restaurants. Even if the place wasn't fancy, eating out was a little bit of luxury that I indulged in simply to feel special in a hard-knock world.

In those days, I could barely afford to eat in Putsch's Cafeteria, but I did, because it was often the only decent hot meal I had all week. If I had enough extra dough for a piece of coconut cream pie, it was really a good week.

That brings me to the current economic climate and how we've just got to support our local restaurants -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

Call it a coincidence, but an inexpensive chain restaurant that I almost never think about came up twice in conversations last week. The first time was when a stockbroker – once a regular at the Capital Grill -- told me his income had taken such a plunge that he was going to have to start eating at Ryan’s Grill, Buffet & Bakery instead. He wasn’t laughing.

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By OWEN MORRIS

A KU college student with no money to go anywhere during break decides to go to Kansas City. There's good stuff I didn't know about and some stuff I've covered to death, but it's still interesting to read about someone looking at the city for the first time. (UDK)

The name of this one says it all: "Fifteen Monstrous Harvesters" including the number-one machine of destruction, a walking tree harvester that looks like something out of nightmares I used to have when I'd watch the Brave Little Toaster before bed. (OObject)

In honor of everyone's favorite Mr. Magoo explorer, here's a list of wines Columbus would drink. Any wine strong enough to make you think it's a good idea to sail to an unknown land is a wine for me! (Forbes)

Whoever hasn't sent an alcohol-fueled embarrassing/incriminating/dumb e-mail to an ex late one night, let thee cast the first stone. Really? That many of you haven't done it? Well for those of you like me, there's a new lab application in Gmail called Mail Goggles that makes you solve some math problems before letting you send out that drunken rant let's-still-be-friends note. Yes, this application is for real. (Gmail Blog via Copyranter)

Here's a video of the scary walking tree harvester:

By OWEN MORRIS

As the weather cools and people start adding more layers, either through clothing or eating, certain foods start reappearing in diets.

Pumpkin is probably most associated with fall, which makes sense. It matures in the fall and is useful as a decoration as well as a menu item. Though it doesn't have a bloom date, chili also starts to reappear on menus this time of year.

That is if it ever disappears at all. A small number of fast-food chains and other drive-through restaurants serve it year-round. This chili can't compete with the quality and service at a local, sit-down establishment but if you're on the go, your options are limited.

The most famous chain chili is Wendy's. "For us, chili is a year-round dish but it does do better in winter months," company spokesman Bob Bertini told me. "It's a real point differentiation between us and our competitors."

Wendy's chili is one of the company's original four menu items (along with a single, fries and a frosty). It cost 55 cents in 1969. Bertini says Wendy's owner Dave Thomas originally put it on the menu as a convenience as much as anything else. "It uses lots of pieces of hamburger. Same ground beef as the hamburgers and it provided a way in which you could use up extra ground beef."

In fact, Wendy's chili has become the source of a scholarly MBA paper. But Wendy's isn't the only fast-food chain that serves chili. Steak n' Shake, which has has three Kansas City area locations, serves a chili that has developed an almost cult-like following -- especially in cities where there are many locations, such as St. Louis.

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By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Fat City commenter Heatherkay was a busy bee all right. She posted the same comment -- and the right answer -- three times! What a honey! And yes Heatherkay, the correct answer was the old Busy Bee Cafe location on 18th Street, just east of Grinders and the Pi Gallery. There hasn't been a restaurant in this venue for many years, but I agree, it would be a great hipster hangout.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Leave it to LaMar's Donuts to plunge into the the election madness before it was too late. LaMar's, which is now headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, was for years Kansas City's best-known maker of those light, fluffy, delicious and fattening morning pastries that I insist on spelling doughnut, even if the latest edition of the Food Lover's Companion suggests that it's perfectly fair to swing both ways.

This morning, a regional manager for LaMar's brought over a big box of the company's latest innovation: two new doughnuts celebrating the presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. The new glazed confections are the "Doughbama," a donkey-shaped creation sprinkled with blue sugar, or the McCandyCain, a yeasty elephant with red sugar.

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By OWEN MORRIS

If you're not a subscriber to Fat City's carb-and-red-meat-filled dining newsletter Pitch Forks. Here's a nibble of what you missed this week:

--Patrick Quillec has closed his south Leawood French bistro Cassis, leaving few options for classic French food in Johnson County.

--More unfortunate news: Power Plant Restaurant and Brewery in Parkville has also closed its doors.

--The Weston Irish Fest is later this week; we told Pitch Forks readers the best night to go and what to look for. (We'll have that info for Fat City readers later this week.)

--Speaking of Weston, there's a pumpkin patch in the Missouri town called Red Barn Farms.

--The 2008 Renaissance Fest ends this week.

--Revisiting First Fridays and JP Wine Bar led us to a happy hour surprise.

That's a quick round-up, but the newsletter contains many more details, including dates, times and links. If you don't want to be left out, sign up for Pitch Forks here.

By OWEN MORRIS

I have another Kansas City Top Ten list to pass along. This one comes from the constantly inventive blog Venus in the Kitchen. Venus has some great and surprising choices. In fact, she and I share a couple, including my Number Eight selection today.

Martin City was a good 20-minute drive from my childhood home, so my parents rarely took me or my brothers there. When we did go, it meant one of two exciting things: We were going to see a show at the Martin City Melodrama's original location (I can't remember a single thing from the various shows, but I do remember that they slayed the nine-year-old me), or we were going to Jack Stack Barbecue.

Back then (for at least part of the time) Fiorella's Jack Stack was known as Smoke Stack and wasn't the upscale barbecue behemoth that it is now. When you entered, you were immediately hit by two smokes -- barbecue and cigarette.

Like German cars, barbecue was something I did not appreciate until I got older. I was a typical boring kid who preferred sickly sweet sauces (KC Masterpiece). At barbecue joints, I'd order a boring roast beef or turkey sandwich. Jack Stack was the first barbecue place where I bucked that trend. After seeing a couple big plates of cubed beef walk by, I pleaded, begged and cajoled my parents into letting me get something called burnt ends. I like to think my real Kansas City education started that day.

What I l really loved from Jack Stack as a child -- and still do today -- isn't the burnt ends, though. It's not even barbecue, but it is Number Eight on my list of Top Ten Kansas City Foods to Eat Before You Die.

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By OWEN MORRIS

At the debates last night Barack Obama looked healthy and vigorous and...was that a salsa stain on his shirt? No. Oh wait, that was my shirt. Obama's favorite Mexican place in Chicago is not the salsa and chips type anyway. (NPR)

One last political post this week. A man in Boca Raton got really mad when it turned out the Sarah Palin he met was not the real Sarah Palin. Best part is she looks nothing like Sarah Palin. (Palm Beach Post)

I've been to some depressing bars but getting drunk in an airport at a Whopper Bar owned by Burger King would take the cake. (WSJ)

Listening to an iPod while running or doing other cardiovascular exercise can actually increase your performance. We're not talking like .0003 percent or some so-small-only-scientists-would-notice number. It can increase performance by as much as 15 percent. That's a whole lot although it still is hell on the ears. (Scientific Blogging)

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Richard and Theresa Ng, owners of the six Bo Lings restaurants in the Kansas City metropolitan area, will be honored as 2008 Restaurateurs of the Year by the Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association at that organization's dinner and awards ceremony on November 12 at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City.

Richard Ng and his wife Theresa (who grew up working in her family's restaurant, the venerable Dragon Innin downtown Overland Park) opened the first Bo Lings at 9055 Metcalf in 1981. The success of the first venue gave the couple -- who are still very hands-on restaurateurs -- the capital to open five more restaurants: in the Plaza Board of Trade building, 4800 Main; across from Oak Park Mall at 95th and Quivira in Orchard Corner Shopping Center in Lenexa; at 135th and Metcalf; and in the Zona Rosa Shopping Center at 1-29 and Barry Road in North Kansas City. The sixth and newest Bo Lings, in Kansas City's City Market, was recently voted "Best Place to Dine Alone" in The Pitch's 2008 Best of Kansas City issue.

For ticket information or reservations, call 816-753-5222. The deadline for reservations is November 5.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Two years ago, Mark and Mary Mollentine stopped serving dinners at their Shawnee restaurant, Governor's Meeting House, to focus on afternoon tea -- who knew there was such a need for this uniquely British tradition in the Kansas suburbs?

The extra time off enabled chef Mark Mollentine to take a second job (he's the executive corporate chef at Lenexa-based Gear for Sports ) and to follow up on another of his dreams, to produce a line of sauces bearing his name.

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