I drove down 39th Street yesterday and was mildly surprised (in a good way) by a couple of the new businesses there.

First, I stopped by Javanaut, a coffee shop in the space previously occupied by Crave at 615 W. 39th Street. The entire space was much cleaner and airy than I remember Crave ever being. Barista Mike Valverde recommended a "London Fog" which is Earl Grey Tea, steamed milk and vanilla. He was quite proud of some of the unique blends Javanaut offers, including specialty coffees from Mexico and Vietnam. In addition to a wide-range of coffee drinks, Javanaut also serves Italian sodas and a limited supply of bakery items.

A block down from Javanaut, on the northeast corner of 39th and Bell, I was pleased to see work on the restaurant that used to be Mama's 39th Street Diner. While there's construction paper blocking any view of the inside, signs promise a place called Thai Garden. I called the number listed on the sign but got no response; it's been that way for more than a month, according to a discussion forum I found on the place.

If you have any news about restaurant openings or closings please e-mail them to me at owen.morris@pitch.com

Ooooohhhh yeah! When I think of Denny's, I think emo bands like All-American Rejects and Taking Back Sunday combining forces with the hard-partying Eagles of Death Metal and making one delicious omelet. At least that is my dream.

Starting at 10 tonight my dream finally comes true. That's when Denny's restaurants across America start serving aDenny's Rockstar Menu to beleaguered and/or drunk late-night guests.

The musical groups may not be memorable but the food is, with names like "Taking Back Bacon Burger Fries," developed by those culinary wizards Taking Back Sunday, and the "Plain White Shake" by Plain White Ts. The other two musical dishes on the menu tonight are "The All-American S.O.S." by the All-American Rejects and "Heart On A Plate" by Eagles of Death Metal.

If you happen to be at a Denny's in the near future, and order one of these things let me know how it tastes. Assuming, of course, that you survive the sheer rocking it gives your mouth.

I'm taking advanced culinary classes at Johnson County Community College, and plan to journal about each week's experience here.

The first thing you learn about serious cooking is that it uses a lot of pointless French words. For instance, what any normal American would call a melon-baller, I am now told by my textbook (Le Courdon Bleu Professional Cooking Sixth Edition) is actually to be referred to as a parisiennes. The proliferation of langue française is supposedly due to the overwhelming influence French cooking has on modern techniques. But listening to chefs you realize the real reason the language has survived is that it creates a subculture in which chefs can identify each other.

There’s another, bigger benefit as well. Previously, as a layperson I might have made chicken noodle soup but no more! My chicken noodle soup is now consommé printaniere. Better to raise eyebrows (and menu prices) that much more.

An actually useful French phrase is mise en place, which was the basis of my advanced culinary class last night. The literal translation "to put in place." The real-world translation is, "getting your shit together ahead of time."

To that end, the class spent 90 minutes listening to a lecture on making sure to prep in advance, proper holding after preparation and the utter importance of blanching to save vegetables’ color and extend their shelve life by days. Some other important lessons useful to at-home cooks: keeping parsley stems in water and under plastic wrap will extend their shelf life from a couple of days to a month; make sure the steel you use to sharpen the knife is as long or longer than the knife itself.

After a quick overview on stocks, it was off to the kitchen to make some that will last us for the rest of the semester and practice good mise en place.

To help things go more quickly, the professor put students into teams. My partner Jennifer and I quickly decided that she would do prep work like chopping vegetables while I gathered ingredients. Unlike me, Jennifer has excellent knife skills. She holds the knife correctly and places her index finger and thumb on opposite side of the blade itself, as if pinching it. My bad habit is that I keep my index finger on top of the blade with the rest of my hand wrapped around the handle like I'm pointing. This grip is a no-no for chefs because it causes cramping and gives less stability to the blade, which makes for less-consistent cuts.

As Jennifer diced, I ran around the cramped kitchen looking for the ingredients of mirepoix (another French term to describe a mixture of onions, carrots and celery) and trying to find an ounce of this or that spice. It was the opposite of mis en place. To be fair, that's the way I feel about every kitchen the first time I try to work it. Each kitchen has its own idiosyncrasies and it takes a lot of time to become comfortable in it.

Time is something Jennifer and I did not have. The three stocks we had to make were fish fumet (fish with wine), vegetable stock and court bouillon (fish, no wine.) In theory, each of these stocks should simmer for 30 to 40 minutes but by the time we had all the ingredients in the pot and added the water, there were only ten minutes to let the stocks simmer.

A good stock that has simmered properly will have vibrant color and taste to match. As Jennifer was straining the fish fumet, using a China-cap to catch the vegetables and fish parts, I got a spoon to taste it. It was extremely light colored and sure enough, tasted like murky fish water.

As I was gagging on the fish fumet, I glanced at the the group next to us and noticed their stocks was a deep golden brown and smelled delicious too. That's when I remembered that while I immediately went lunging around the kitchen, their group had taken a couple of minutes and organized all three of the recipes' ingredients together and then grouped similar ingredients together. So while I had to make four trips to the spice rack they had to only make one. Organization is the main part of mis en place and their group actually practiced it while I just took notes about it and then went back to bad old habits. It was a good lesson to learn and hopefully one I do not repeat again. I'm taking mise en place seriously from now on.

My friend Bob knew there was trouble when he walked into the restaurant formerly known as the Trolley Inn at 11400 East Truman Road and saw a fancy espresso machine where the old grill used to be.

“I went in for a cheeseburger,” Bob mourned, “and the new owner doesn’t serve cheeseburgers or anything deep-fried anymore. It’s a soup place!”

As recently as 2006, when the diner – which is still only a long counter with low stools – was owned by Jason and Frances Tonnahill, the menu featured eggs and bacon, burgers and fried pork tenderloins. And smoking! Those days, baby, are long gone.

I stopped in to place – now named Novella’s Soup Trolley -- yesterday for breakfast. It’s been open for four weeks and, yes, Bob was right: The grill is gone. The friendly new owner of the diner, Jeff Wilson, named it for his late grandmother, who wasn’t just a legendary cook, he says, but passed down hundreds of recipes to him. Including that day’s carrot soup, which he found in an old letter to his grandmother bearing a 1923 postmark.

Instead of grilling or frying food, Wilson uses a convection burner – which requires very little grease -- and a convection oven (which he uses to bake the thick slices of french toast that he serves on ridiculously small plates). The breakfast menu is limited to the baked french toast, frittatas, “personal scramblers” (patrons can choose three ingredients from a list of cheeses, meats and vegetables) and biscuits and gravy.

Alas, there were no biscuits and gravy that morning. Wilson explained that if he used too many electrical outlets in the old trolley, the electricity blew out. So the gravy wasn’t ready. Maybe another day.

His helper hadn’t shown up yet, so he was pretty busy doing all the cooking himself, including getting that day’s soup ready for the lunch shift. I did stay for breakfast, a “personal scrambler” made with the cheddar, Italian sausage and red peppers that I had personally selected. The toast was cold, but the eggs were good.

But soups are the place’s specialty. Wilson features at least one soup every day and it’s a lot more sophisticated than chicken noodle or tomato. This week’s selections include today’s Caribbean crab bisque, Thursday’s chicken Parmesan and Sunday’s Rhode Island bean soup.

Instead of burgers, Wilson serves cold sandwiches (crunchy chicken salad) or baked melts, like the turkey melt. The old glass-front refrigerated pastry case is now filled with cans of chilled soda pop, but another one has little pans of homemade “personal pies,” including cherry crisp, cheesecake and key lime. A little pie costs 99 cents. A slightly larger one is $1.99.

In addition to good ol’ java, Wilson offers lattes and cappuccino, which can be sweetened with flavored syrups.

Two nice ladies with matching hairdos, both owners of shops on historic Independence Square, were eating breakfast and badgering Wilson with questions. “Have you joined the Chamber of Commerce yet?” one asked. “That will bring in a lot of business.”

As long as they don’t expect a cheeseburger!

To call Doug Frost the wine expert of Kansas City is an understatement. He's one of three people in the world (the world!) to hold the two most prestigious titles in wine — Master Sommelier and Master of Wine. He travels extensively educating people and restaurants on wine through lectures, consultations and judging. I caught up with him at the Broadway Cafe and asked him what he eats when no one is watching.

The nature of my job and my life is nothing but guilty pleasures so there's no short list for me. But for shitty food, I'm a popcorn and chardonnay kind of guy. Everybody in my realm bitches about chardonnay ... which I think is complete and utter bullshit. Just because they're bored with it doesn't mean everyone else is bored with it.

As for popcorn. It’s a total guilty pleasure. I love it and try not to eat it very often because if you leave it in front of me, I'll completely go nuts and chug, like, a huge container of it. I’ll just buy some popcorn at the store, put it in pan, put some olive oil in there and fry that bad-boy up. I never put butter on it, but you’ve got to put salt on it.

Ever since I was about two years old popcorn has always been the shit to me … Maybe three-years-old? I'm not sure when I was first allowed popcorn but I definitely did that face of "ooohhh that's good." Never liked candy. Never liked cakes. Never liked any of that stuff but popcorn was [taking imaginary huge bucket of popcorn to face] woooolf.

I'll drink anything with popcorn. It's good with red wine. It's good with white wine, whatever. But it's really good with chardonnay (and champagne). Get a big ol chunk of jarlsberg cheese, some popcorn, a bottle of chardonnay and there's absolutely no brain-cells injured at all because I'm completely mindless at that point.

In terms of really guilty pleasures. Really oaky chardonnay, fucked-up oaky chardonnay. Kendall-Jackson? What's wrong with that? I know I'm not supposed to like that but I do like it. Their proprietors-reserve chardonnay is delicious. Gallo? Kiss my ass. I love it. It's good wine.

Sammy Loren visiting Primanti Bros. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Recently, an aspiring filmmaker (and a former little-league baseball teammate) named Aaron Lindenbaum e-mailed me to say he was producing a documentary on sandwiches and whether I knew any places he should visit in Kansas City. It piqued my interest since I have a great love of sandwiches. I wrote Lindenbaum back and he, along with the film's director, Sammy Loren, met me for coffee -- sadly, not sandwiches.

Lindenbaum says the doc is called Sandwiched in America. "We want to look at the sandwich through the lens of American entrepreneurial innovation: Where has the sandwich gone, where is it going ... how sandwiches fulfilled a substance need back in the day and now how it's become marketed. And now, with cutting-edge sandwiches, restaurants are pushing the boundaries. We have visited restaurants in middle America starting with Pittsburgh and ending here in Kansas City."

Lindenbaum and Loren, friends for more than ten years, came up with the idea when they were living on opposites sides of the country. "We'd always be calling each other about different sandwiches we made," Loren says. "Aaron needed to drive back from New York to Kansas City and I had just got back from India and so we said, let's just go into the belly of the beast and do a film on sandwiches."

"We were on this kick of working-class sandwiches and that lead us to Columbus [Ohio]. We had contacted this restaurant called the Surly Girl Saloon which turned out not to be not working class at all," Loren says. "Still, they had a really cool sandwich there called the 'spicy peanut butter and banana sandwich' and it came with a side of marshmallows and a quart of chocolate milk; like the kind you get in grade school." The Surly Girl Saloon was expecting a visit from the mayor to talk about how the restaurant was joining up with a local environmental effort. "So we wanted to get there and maybe convince the mayor to eat one of these sandwiches," Loren says. "By stroke of luck, we got there right in time and I went up to the mayor of Columbus and was like, 'Mayor Coleman, let us treat you to a sandwich.' And he did...He was really cool."

The sandwich, however, wasn't so great. "I didn't like it," Lindenbaum says. "It was too spicy. Gave me bad indigestion. One thing I did like though about the Surly Girl Saloon. it's almost like a cool feminist restaurant. It's owned by women and they differentiate their women-brewed beers from their normal-brewed beers ... taking it to the future and being really progressive."

The film is still in production. They want to get it finished before September and then try to find outlets that might buy it. "Ideally it would amazing to get on the Food Network," Lindenbaum says. "The truth is they probably won't show something like this because it's not just about food. We try to touch upon more that these sandwiches say something about American culture and how it's been moving through the ages. We'd like to dig a little deeper than "look at this weird sandwich."

You can learn more about Loren's former productions at mindfulmediacollective.blogspot.com