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By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Last week, Egg McMuffin inventor Herb Peterson died at age 89 in his Santa Barbara home.

This brought back a wave of nostalgia. For many years my idea of the perfect breakfast was a cup of black coffee, a granola bar and a Marlboro Light. Then I went through a phase where I started each morning with an Egg McMuffin. They’re only 300 calories and so convenient: There’s a McDonald’s a couple of blocks from my house, and the employees at the drive-through window didn’t seem to mind that I looked like the unshaven, bleary-eyed wrath of God as I paid for my fast-and-easy breakfast and got the hell out of there.

After a couple of weeks, I decided I didn’t like Egg McMuffins either. The English muffins are too chewy (there were a couple of mornings I felt I was gnawing through jerky), the Canadian bacon is too salty and the fried egg tends to be rubbery. So I gave them up too.

But the news of Peterson’s death made me crave one. I drove over to my neighborhood McD’s and ordered one and ate it in the car. It was still terrible.

Later that morning, I got an e-mail from my college friend Slim, who was also waxing nostalgic about the McMuffin. We were sophomores the year that McDonald’s rolled out the McMuffin concept to all of it national franchisees. Slim insisted that the sandwich wasn’t just a great hangover remedy -- it never worked that way for me, by the way – but that it had been tastier back in the 1970s.

“I’m telling you that they were good then,” he e-mailed me. “Now they taste like plastic.”

This is the same friend who still insists that Twinkies tasted different during that era and that Hostess Sno-Balls were fluffier and that Long John Silver’s fried fish was – in his words -- as good as anything you’d find on the streets of London.

“It’s all the chemicals and artificial ingredients and processed stuff they put in everything now,” he wrote. “Why else would everything have tasted better in the 1970s?”

I wrote back: The drugs, maybe?

His response? “Those were better back then too!”

It was a very good omen, I thought, when the Cordish Company announced it had snagged a local outpost of the popular Bice (pronounced bee-chay), a stylish Italian restaurant on New York City’s East Side, for the Power & Light District. The Bice Restaurant Group will open three concepts – a bistro, a café and a lounge -- in the two-story restaurant. Later, a friend asked me if Bice was the Italian word for “bitch.” That might be a little too cutting-edge for Kansas City, I’m afraid; I believe that in Rome, the slang word might be cogna (that’s what it is in Buffalo, anyway), which might be a good name for a restaurant, but that’s another story.

For years I’ve been hearing about the legendary fried chicken dinners at the Brookville Hotel – which used to be in Brookville, Kansas, but moved in 1999 to the somewhat bigger city of Abilene. This year, the James Beard Foundation honored the Brookville as one of “America’s Classics.” It was time for a road trip.

A dozen years ago or so, a Johnson County teenager named Paul Lovelace would occasionally accompany his father, Jack, then editor of the Overland Park-based Sun Newspapers, to press junkets in New York City. Young Lovelace saw firsthand how Hollywood would wine, dine and schmooze reporters from all over the country in order to earn positive media coverage for big-budget films.

These days Paul Lovelace is a 30-year-old documentary filmmaker in New York City. He travels the country shilling his own motion picture projects – and on his own dime. Last night Lovelace returned to Kansas City (he’s a 1995 graduate of Shawnee Mission South High School) for a screening of the film The Holy Modal Rounders…Bound to Lose at Screenland; Lovelace co-directed the documentary about the famed psychedelic folk duo with Sam Wainwright Douglas and was also one of the film’s four producers.

One of the high points of last weekend’s Ethnic Enrichment Festival at Swope Park was a dazzling fashion show featuring the couture creations of young Vietnamese-American designer Nhut Trang. His name may be a lot more difficult to pronounce than, say, Mark Jacobs or Alexander McQueen, but the Ho Chi Minh City native, who immigrated to the United States in 1992, has the same passion for creating beautiful clothes.

On the glass counter near the entrance of the Bollywood Indian Bistro (20100 East Jackson, Independence) are a dish of hard candies and a box with cream-colored paper fliers announcing that the month of August is the “Grand Opening” of the restaurant. The restaurant actually opened well over a year ago and for all I know, the fliers are leftovers from last summer. Or are they new? The restaurant has recently re-opened after a three-month hiatus where the doors were locked and the lights were off.

No one working at the restaurant wanted to talk about the three-month period where the restaurant was closed. The manager of the place – which is still owned by chef Daljit Singh – got a funny look on his face when I asked. “There was a problem,” he said.

Before July fades, let’s not forget an important culinary anniversary that should have been celebrated all over Missouri this month but wasn’t. Well, not in Kansas City anyway.

One of the biggest Kansas City restaurant mysteries of the last year has been: Will any local restaurateur be brave enough to take over the ancient venue abandoned by Nichols Lunch 10 months ago? The legendary Nichols Lunch wasn’t just one of the last independently owned, 24-hour diners left in midtown. But at 85 years old, it was one of the oldest continually-operating restaurants in the city when it locked up the doors September 24.

Yesterday, “Mama” Jan Imber and Ira Auerbach, owners of the 10-year-old Bell Street Mama’s diner at 1726 West 39th Street, confirmed that they had signed a lease on the Nichols Lunch location at 39th Street and Southwest Trafficway and had already started renovation on the space.

Kansas City’s never had a Chinatown neighborhood, but over the last century, there usually have been two or three Chinese groceries around the 150-year-old City Market. What’s been missing from Kansas City’s oldest neighborhood was a Chinese restaurant. Flash forward to right now – and a brand-new Bo Lings.

Restaurateur Thelma Oliver is three times hotter than the fiery peppers she uses in her green chili pork. The owner of the two-year-old Mango Room at 1111 Main Street has had about all she can take of downtown construction hurting her business. The current spate of construction -- which has the Mango Room’s main entrance wrapped in orange netting and ripped-up sidewalks – is the third major project on this corner since Oliver opened in May 2005. These construction nightmares – one was the destruction of the old Jones Store building across the street – are all part of the so-called downtown renaissance that promises a revitalized urban zone filled with shops, entertainment and restaurants.

It’s not unusual to hear about people impersonating celebrities. A decade or so, a young blond woman was having a grand old time going to restaurants in Kansas City and whispering to the servers not to tell anyone that she was Tori Spelling. She wasn’t, but a lot of star-struck waiters went overboard fawning over the chick.

And then there’s the strange case of a Texas dance instructor who got caught impersonating Tommy Rall.

Tommy who?

Back in the 1950s, at the tail end of the era of big studio movie musicals, a handful of famous male dancers were making a splash on the movie screen: Gene Kelly, of course, and Donald O’Connor, Dan Dailey, Russ Tamblyn and a wispy-haired blond from Chicago named Bob Fosse, who would become a lot more famous as a Broadway choreographer.

There’s a kind of irony that just one day after national headlines reported that former University of Pittsburgh star and NFL first-round draft pick Bob Buczkowski pleaded guilty to helping operate an estimated million-dollar prostitution ring – out of his mom and dad’s house, no less – that we celebrate the birthday (here at the Pitch, anyway) of Kansas City’s most famous brothel keeper of a different century.

Today marks the 164th anniversary of the birth of Kansas City’s most famous madam, Annie Chambers.

Now that the Twin Oaks apartments at 50th and Oak have been reduced – after nearly five months of demolition – to a mound of rubble, it’s time for a fond farewell to the two 11-story residential towers. But not a sad adieu to the memory of the buildings at the unattractive end of their 60-year life, but in the flush of the glamorous early years, back when Twin Oaks was considered the address for sophisticated Kansas Citians.

Next month, the 2007 Tony Awards – named for the late actress and director Antoinette Perry (1888-1946) – will be presented at the historic Radio City Music Hall and aired on CBS. The event honors excellence in New York City’s theater community.

In July, the 2007 Zoey Awards – named for the very-much-alive veteran Kansas City femme illusionist Zoe Kelly – will be presented at the historic Athenaeum at 900 East Linwood Avenue. The event honors, according to Ms. Kelly, “all aspects of Kansas City’s gay community, including best bar owner and best male vocalist.”

Thirty years ago today – May 10, 1977 – the big story on most of the morning TV shows was the announcement that one of Hollywood’s most legendary movie stars, Joan Crawford, had died at age 72. Although Crawford was technically a native of San Antonio, Texas (she was born there as Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1905), Kansas City claimed her as a hometown girl since she arrived in town as a 10-year-old with her mother, her brother and her stepfather. She went by “Billie Cassin” back then, and she spent most of her formative years here. She lived in Kansas City, in fact, right up to the day she hopped on the Missouri Pacific westbound train for Hollywood on New Year’s Day in 1925.