At KC-area restaurant, the sampler platter comes with a mountain of food, all amazing
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Let’s Dish, Kansas City
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At restaurants, I like to share. What can I say? I’m a generous person.
Actually, it’s because I’m cheap. I want to know what everything on the menu tastes like, but I don’t want to pay for each dish. This is especially true at places where I’m less familiar with the style of cuisine. If I’m ordering for myself, and I try something scary that I’ve never had before, and it’s bad, then I’m stuck with that stinky order. But if we order several things together, one bad dish won’t spoil the meal. I believe this is called “spreading the risk.”
The beautiful thing about Las Palmas, a Central American restaurant in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, is that first-timers don’t have to pick and choose which menu items to try. You can just order the Platillo Tipico — sort of a Central American sampler platter.
“You get a little bit from all these different countries,” said Gisela Ardon, who manages the restaurant with her sister Alba.
That is, more or less, the conceit of Las Palmas, which Ardon’s parents, Connie Ardon and Alfonso Cruz, opened at 825 Minnesota Ave. in 2007. Connie is from Guatemala and arrived in the U.S. in 1996; Alfonso was raised in Mexico and came here in 2000. The menu includes dishes from both of those countries, as well as El Salvador and Honduras.
“A lot of the recipes come from my mom,” Gisela Ardon said. “It’s what she ate growing up.”
With the Platillo Tipico, you get a mountain of food — six distinct dishes — for about $15.
On it, you’ll find the mighty pupusa, the national dish of El Salvador.
“Pupusas are for sure our most popular thing here,” Gisela Ardon said.
They’ll stuff whatever you want inside this thick corn tortilla: cheese, beans, pork, jalapenos. (I have always been impressed with the service at Las Palmas. They take my poor Spanish pronunciation in stride, seem genuinely happy to answer my gringo questions about the food, and sometimes even ask me questions about my preferences in order to better customize the order.)
The pastelito is essentially an empanada. It comes with your choice of beef, chicken or potatoes inside. The tortilla is orange. “That’s a more Guatemalan style,” Ardon said.
Also representing Guatemala is a tamal, which unlike a typical corn tamale is sweet and doesn’t have a meat filling. I like a savory-sweet contrast, so I dip it in Las Palmas’ green sauce, which has a chile serrano base.
The Guatemalan rellenito — plantains stuffed with refried black beans and milk and coated with sugar on the outside — approaches dessert territory. “It’s like a cinnamon banana or something,” I remember croaking between greedy bites to my fellow diners on my first visit.
Rounding out the plate are a few Honduran items: a yuca, a root vegetable fried like a potato, and tajadas de banana, which are fried green banana chips. “They’re kind of like french fries, almost,” Ardon said. I dip them in the table tomato sauce, which is thinner and tangier than the salsa you find at most restaurants.
Las Palmas is never so slammed that you can’t get in, but it’s always pretty busy, even at odd hours like 3 in the afternoon. It is sometimes a bit of a party atmosphere. They stock the coolers with a variety of hard-to-find Latin American beers (Club Colombia, Poker, Toña) and are often cranking cumbia music over speakers that pipe out onto the sidewalk.
“We started the music during COVID when we were only doing orders to go,” Ardon said. “Then we just kept it up. It grabs attention.”
Advantageously, the restaurant lies within walking distance of the 7th Street Casino and several government buildings: the Wyandotte County Courthouse, the U.S. District Court of Kansas Courthouse, the police station, the Board of Public Utilities.
“People come in after they get their tags renewed, or after their court date,” Ardon said.
But Las Palmas also gets plenty of customers — some Central American, but some not — from beyond Wyandotte County.
“People seem to know about us,” Ardon said. “We have people coming in from Topeka, Manhattan, Wichita. They stop by when they’re in town. We’ve never advertised, but word has spread, I think.”
I’m happy to spread it a little further. And if that means larger crowds, Ardon and her family are prepared. They’re planning to expand to the space next door soon.
“We want to get a little bigger,” Ardon said.
This story was originally published January 9, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
