Stroud’s pans for new customers in southern OP

I have always been a fan of Stroud’s, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

There were gripes when longtime owner Mike Donegan moved the restaurant from its original location on 85th Street — a roadhouse dating from the early 1930s — to a newer, freestanding building in Fairway, in 2008. Some people said the food wasn’t as good. But I thought the chicken tasted pretty much as it always had, and by that time, I’d been eating it regularly for a quarter century. (My pace hasn’t slowed since, either.)

I’m a native Midwesterner, which makes me as much of a fried-chicken expert as anyone can be. We had several beloved chicken joints in my hometown, all of them a little more genteel than Stroud’s but none quite as good. By the time I got to Kansas City, I’d missed out on a couple of this town’s legendary fried-chicken hot spots. I’m thinking of the Green Parrot and the Wishbone, mainly. But I spent plenty of time in places that didn’t want for fowl cachet: KCK’s Mrs. Peters (where the side dishes were better than the bird), a downtown joint called Granny’s (where the chicken was better than the sides), the sensational Three Friends on Prospect (where everything was delicious).

They’re all gone now. They’re gone, but Stroud’s remains. In fact, it’s getting bigger.

The newest Stroud’s restaurant in the metro is in Overland Park, occupying a rehabbed Mimi’s Café on 135th Street. The place has its own idiosyncrasies but mostly echoes the feel of the Fairway location. It and the Stroud’s in Fairway and the Stroud’s Oak Ridge Manor (in the Northland) don’t manage the peculiar raucousness and boozy charm of the original, of course, but they probably couldn’t. That was a place where, on Sunday afternoons, you had to yell across the table to be heard.

The Overland Park restaurant, which opened about three months ago, does carry on a couple of the original’s traditions. Which is to say it’s a warren of dining rooms with bad acoustics and inconsistent service. On my first visit to this suburban Stroud’s, my tablemates and I had a smart, with-it server named Renee (a 30-year veteran of the Waid’s chain). She not only knew the ropes but also could unravel any knot with her eyes closed. That meal was a rewarding experience, from soup to check. The fried chicken was golden and crispy, the mashers creamy and hot, the fried potatoes divine.

My second visit was less positive. The server was a dizzy chatterbox who never picked up the cues to leave us alone. She had a monologue to share and, damn it, she was going to perform it. It was the food that didn’t speak to me. The fried chicken tasted slightly off, as though prepared in oil that needed changing. The pan-fried pork chops looked like brown hockey pucks, though they were moist under that too-crusty armor. And the broiled North Atlantic salmon that I ordered arrived swimming in a pool of dill-butter sauce that eventually dribbled over every article of clothing I was wearing. You think fried chicken can be messy? After I tried that fish, I didn’t walk out of the restaurant — I slid.

I know: That sounds less than less than positive.

But here I pause my Stroud’s review to deliver my own short monologue, about how I came to appreciate the beauty of even a lesser meal at Stroud’s.

Between visits to the new Stroud’s, I made a trip to a fried-chicken restaurant in Crawford County, Kansas. I had long been led to understand that this place was, for chicken lovers, iconic. I won’t name the particular restaurant, but I will say its deep-fried bird doesn’t come close to the quality of what can be had at Stroud’s. What I ate in Crawford County brought to mind a culinary memory I’d long banished from my mind: the Banquet fried-chicken TV dinner. The experience made me appreciate just what Mike Donegan has accomplished since 1977.

Maybe the comparison is unfair. Deep-fried chicken is a brutish satisfaction compared with the fine art of pan-frying. (Then again, Rye, in Leawood, pulls it off.) But the preparation style is almost beside the point when we talk about what makes a Stroud’s meal memorable. Yes, more often than not, the chicken comes out perfectly fried. It’s the rest of the experience that has won my affection, though. From the plastic-mesh basket of cellophane-wrapped crackers on the table (I still eat them) to those chubby biscuits, baked with a sweet-salty crust of sugar and cinnamon, I look forward to the whole meal. I don’t say that about many places.

I’m not alone. On my recent visits, I watched patrons at the other tables react as that big round tray showed up, crammed with a platter of fried chicken and bowls of steaming green beans and mashed potatoes and gravy. The expressions were uniform: unabashed delight. I don’t see that at many places.

So for reasons of shared dining delight alone, I have high hopes for this newest outpost of the Stroud’s brand. It and the other Stroud’s restaurants still serve the kind of home-style food that few make at home anymore. This isn’t everyday cuisine. It’s special-occasion food, and at Stroud’s it’s still special.