Jenny Vergara recalls the day she stopped apologizing for Kansas City’s restaurant scene.
The Lenexa blogger, who dishes about the local food scene at www.makingafoodie.com, was sipping cocktails with Marshall Roth on the patio of Le Fou Frog, the funky French bistro just east of the River Market.
Roth, the 33-year-old bleached-blond rock star of a chef, asked for her favorite places to eat. Vergara launched into her list of faves, but she kept adding the phrase, “Pretty good, for Kansas City.”
“Stop!” Roth said. “The bar is what you make it.”
Trained at the Culinary Institute of America, Roth worked at top restaurants on both coasts before moving to Kansas City two years ago from Aspen, Colo. His latest assignment as executive chef for the McClain Restaurant Group is to turn Ophelia’s and Café Verona, both on the historic Independence Square, into dining destinations.
“It was a real moment of clarity. It seared my soul,” Vergara recalls. “He’s right. I had my own rose-colored glasses on. It started awakening me to the Kansas City food scene right under my nose.”
These days Vergara is not the only one hip to Kansas City’s culinary charms.
Chef Jonathan Justus of Justus Drugstore in Smithville was featured in Food & Wine magazine several times last year but scored the ultimate media coup earlier this month with a feature story in The New York Times Magazine.
“This already has generated more phone calls from other media,” said Justus, who has heard from Saveur and Bon Appétit.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Food & Wine gave a big nod to confectioner Christopher Elbow, naming his new dark chocolate bar as No. 1 in a recent top 10 survey of the country’s best chocolates.
Chef Colby Garrelts of Blue-stem put Kansas City on Food & Wine’s radar back in 2005 when he was tapped as one of the best new rising chefs, an honor that recognizes young talent.
So when the magazine’s editors fanned out across the country to report their 2008 Restaurant Go List, they wound up focusing on Kansas City. Artisan bakery Fervere, fast-casual lunch spots Souperman and Po’s Dumpling Bar and a mix of contemporary casual restaurants, including 1924 Main, Room 39, JP Wine Bar and Coffee House and Michael Smith, made the grade.
Kate Krader, Food & Wine’s senior editor, returned to dine at Justus Drugstore and named a soup made from a dozen seasonal mushrooms floating in a pork broth as one of the magazine’s Best Restaurant Dishes of 2008.
“We love your city! We’re basically going to set up an office there,” Krader said.
Farm to table
Considered the “first lady of modern Italian cuisine,” Lidia Bastianich has spent the last decade commuting from the Big Apple to oversee Lidia’s Kansas City, a far-flung outpost in her New York City-based restaurant empire.
She’s a James Beard award-winning chef with a PBS show, four best-selling cookbooks and a signature brand of spaghetti sauce available in supermarkets.
The annual James Beard Awards are the culinary industry’s equivalent of the Academy Awards and honor the finest chefs, restaurants, journalists, cookbook authors, restaurant designers and electronic media professionals in the country.
“I think Kansas City is positioned in a very special place,” Bastianich says. Her decision to renovate a dilapidated freight house into the space for her first restaurant outside of New York ushered the rebirth of the art galleries and performance spaces that now dot the chic Crossroads Arts District.
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