Kansas City News Blog

Poor Virgil Thomson. The famous, award-winning composer -- he lived from 1896 to 1989 -- from midtown Kansas City hardly gets any respect in his home town and to add insult to injury, a new musical play about him in New York City just got a bad review in the New York Times.

It's not Virgil's fault that the show got panned -- it's the show! Virgil Thomson, who was as respected for his "incisive wit" and writing talents as his musical compositions, is apparently not well-served by "Oh Virgil! A Theatrical Portrait" by the creators of the show. The Times reviewer, Neil Genzlinger, writes that although the play bills itself as a "snapshot of one of the most remarkable, influential and controversial artists," there's a problem in translation: "But that guy never shows up. Instead some sour, self-absorbed old dude plants himself on the stage: you're tempted to go up there and heave him into the wings to make way for that erudite, multi-talented fellow you've heard so much about."

(Image via Flickr: Painting by Alice Neel)

 

The Golden Ox got a little smoky yesterday, but the 60-year-old steakhouse didn't burn down.

Pitch food critic Charles Ferruzza reports over on Fat City that firefighters quickly extinguished the blaze and the Golden Ox suffered little damage and could be open as soon as Wednesday.

Here's a clip:

A fire in the grill tonight wafted up through the restaurant's ventilation system (a somewhat similar incident took place last February at the original Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue in Martin City).

Oh, and Ferruzza promises a review of the Golden Ox in this week's edition of The Pitch.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

In an election season, a tasteful “meet-and-greet” cocktail reception or brunch for a political candidate (with ample opportunity and pens for check-writing) is practically de rigueur for Kansas City hosts and hostesses with social consciousness – and spacious living rooms.

Last Sunday, Jordan and Betty Bushman opened their beautifully appointed Plaza condominium for just such a soiree.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

The good news: One of my favorite weekend breakfast joints — R.J.’s Bob-Be-Que Shack at 5835 Lamar in Mission — is now serving up big platters of smoked meats and eggs during the week.

The bad news: It’s one of the few Kansas City restaurants that offers a breakfast too big even for me to finish off.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

When it comes coffee, you never know what to believe. Over the years I’ve read differing medical reports that insist coffee causes cancer, coffee cures cancer, coffee is a great hair tonic, coffee causes hair to fall out and – don’t ask me where exactly I read these -- coffee either exacerbates impotence or causes erections that last for days.

This week, USA Today led off a health news story with this sentence: “Drinking up to six cups of coffee a day may lower the overall odds of dying prematurely, mainly because it cuts the risk of dying from heart disease.”

Six cups seems a little excessive. But in the event I do kick the bucket prematurely, I probably should be drinking my morning coffee at Rev Café & Gallery (2010 Main Street). A friend had told me that it was a Christian coffee shop.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Café Trio, officially turns four years old this month — if you don’t count the several months that Chris Youngers and Tai Nguyen spent operating their midtown restaurant as Pappagallo, the previous tenant at 3535 Broadway which Youngers and Nguyen bought out in 2003.

But instead of celebrating that birthday with a bang, the young bistro owners are in a frenzy of orchestrating their move to a bigger venue.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

There’s been some significant movement in Kansas City’s restaurant scene this week.
After failing to keep her Overland Park restaurant 40 Sardines open as the sole chef-owner, Debbie Gold is bouncing back from her divorce from chef Michael Smith (who has remarried and now runs his own namesake restaurant at 1900 Main Street with his wife Nancy).

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

As an ex-waiter, I still have the occasional server’s nightmare: In my dream, I’m standing in the middle of a well-appointed dining room of a restaurant that I’ve never seen before. It’s a Saturday night, every table is full and I don’t see another waiter in the joint. A strange manager hands me a waiter’s pad and a pen, points off to a remote spot in the room and says, “You’re in Station Five.” Then he vanishes.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Later this week, the Pi Gallery hosts an “Art Dinner” featuring local chef Heather Hands. Gallery owner Jody Wilkins says the evening will blend “fine art, fine food and informal conversation with fine artists.” For the dinner, at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 14, Chef Hands has created a menu that begins with vegetarian spring rolls with hoison sauce, pan-seared shrimp and pineapple skewers with sweet chili lime sauce, and lettuce cups with carrots, shittake mushrooms, leeks, cashew, Thai basil, and ginger soy ponzu. The main entrée choices include a lamb chop, miso-marinated striped bass, or a vegetarian selection served over sauteed baby bok choi with asian vegetable slaw with a mint verde sauce. The evening dessert will be lemon sorbet and fresh strawberries with a jasmine green tea reduction. Singer Kelley Hunt performs as the finale of the evening. The meal is priced at $50 per person and space is limited; reservations should be made by June 9 to Jody Wilkins at 816-210-6534. Pi is located at 419 E. 18th St.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

It’s a lot easier to find local restaurants that serve their own house-brewed beers and ales these days than home-made root beer. But the foamy brew that Bill and Ann Kendall serve at Mugs Up Root Beer Drive-In in Independence (700 E. 23rd St.) is made from the same recipe that this distinctive white-and-orange burger joint has sold for 51 years.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Summer is officially here, and that means it’s drive-in season.

This spring, the 50-year-old Clem’s Drive-In re-opened at 10802 E. 23rd Street in Independence. It had closed in March 2007 after its most recent owner, Brent Gilbert, decided to move on to other ventures. Bob and Janet Andrist bought the business, which still boasts, more or less, the original menu: crumbly-meat sandwiches, chili dogs, chili, milkshakes and onion rings.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

Thank goodness for little miracles: The fabulous Cheese Steak sandwich on the lunch menu at the short-lived Sarah’s restaurant at 1815 Grand survived the transition to its new incarnation, Twist Urban Eatery. Sarah’s opened in November but I waited until a few weeks ago to check it out. I had a very nice lunch in chef Sarah Walker’s namesake bistro and was so impressed that I decided to eat dinner there a couple of nights later. When I arrived for an evening meal, though, the big windows were papered over. Sarah’s was gone, obviously, and there were notices taped up announcing a new concept was moving into the space: Twist.

“Sarah decided to move on,” says her former business partner, Lana Todd (pictured at right), the new owner of Twist. I didn’t ask for more details because, frankly, it was none of my damn business. Todd had been an investor in Sarah’s because she was a friend of Walker’s and admired her culinary skills – Walker’s resume includes stints at the former Café Allegro, Joe D’s and the Capital Grille – and the venture sounded like a great idea. There was certainly room for a fresh new restaurant concept that offered breakfast, lunch, dinner – and art shows!

But many of the customers driving to the chain restaurants in the Power & Light District seemed to ignore the vivid orange awning in front of Sarah’s and I heard complaints about the price points. Sarah’s wasn’t a moderately priced dining experience in the evening: entrees ranged from $17 to $28 and the wine list included some lovely but costly vintages.

After briefly closing down the restaurant, Todd took over the operation herself, promoting Walker’s chef de cuisine Jonah Thompson to executive chef and boosting staffer Anna Miller to the chef de cuisine position. The interior is the same bright, airy and attractive space. Todd hired a curator, Billy Smith, to arrange for new art shows every month and starting in June, the restaurant will offer live musical performances on First Friday nights.

By day, the petite Todd is a business planer for IBM. She also teaches Pilates and yoga, which she attributes to keeping her feel energized and lively as she juggles two full-time jobs. The new Twist menu has a more moderate price structure: $12 for lemon fettuccine Alfredo, $11 for fish and chips and $17 for a Kansas City Strip.

And that same great Philly-style cheese steak sandwich, made with Cheez Whiz, baby.

As for Walker, she’s certainly talented and will show up, somewhere, again soon.

By CHARLES FERRUZZA

My fellow reporter Jen Chen tipped me off to the recent obituary of James Winters Wilkerson, 89, of Mission Hills, who passed away on May 22. Among the late Mr. Wilkerson’s many accomplishments: As president of Merritt Foods, he patented the Bomb Pop.

Wilkerson may have secured the patent for the 52-year-old frozen novelty, but he didn’t invent it. That honor goes to the founder of Merritt Foods, James S. Merritt and his most legendary employee, D.S. “Doc” Abernathy who went on to create the Dole Frozen Dessert bars and the Mutant Ninja Turtles ice cream treats. Merritt died in 1970 at age 54; his namesake company closed in 1991 when its then-owner, Dallas-based Morningstar Group, Inc. decided to get out of the icy-treat business. Iowa-based Wells Dairy bought the Bomb Pop patent after the century-old Merritt plant (originally built as a brewery) on Guinotte Avenue was shut down.

The original six-finned Bom Pop was introduced during the height of Cold War paranoia and atomic bomb testing in the United States. (Another summer innovation inspired by the A-bomb was the bikini, named for the Bikini Atoll nuclear weapons test site.) The three-color -- red, white and blue, of course – popsicle was created in a three-stage process in a trademarked shape. It’s grown longer and thinner over the years, and added color and flavor combinations.

Currently Wells Dairy (which sells over a million of the frozen treats annually) offers ten variations on the theme, including Fudge Bomb Pop, a Jolly Rancher Bomb Pop, a Sour Power Bomb Pop and a sugar-free version – all of which are wildly popular with a generation of tykes who have no concept of what it means to live in terror of a nuclear war. For those who do -- there's a different kind of treat: The Bomb Pop cocktail.

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.

What do you say to a stinky waiter?

My friend Carmen is still ranting about the waiter at a trendy downtown bistro who had such potent body odor that she was nearly knocked out of her chair.

“I’m in the service industry, and I think it’s incredibly unprofessional for a waiter to smell so bad that it ruins your appetite,” Carmen told me. “My friend and I considered getting up and leaving, but he wasn’t that attentive anyway, so we just held our breath every time he came to the table.”