The Brookside institution Carmen’s sings in Leawood

In this economy, it should be no surprise that a good reputation is worth its weight in American Express receipts. That’s why the developers of upscale suburban shopping centers in the metro are eager to recruit local restaurants with identifiable brand names to either move out to the burbs or open satellite locations. Several restaurateurs have confessed to me that some alluring deals have been waved in their faces. Yet most are wary.

“When the economy is shaky,” says one restaurateur who prefers to remain nameless, “you need to focus on your core business, not gamble on expansion.”

Fair enough. But not every local business operator can pass up a good deal, and Juan Bautista, who operates the 11-year-old Carmen’s Café in Brookside with his two brothers, Francisco and Pedro, saw a lot of potential in southern Johnson County.

“They’ve been wonderful to work with,” Juan Bautista said one recent night, looking around the crowded dining room at the new Leawood branch of Carmen’s Café, which opened three months ago. He was talking about his new landlords in the fast-growing Park Place development, where there are restaurants, shops and a boutique hotel. “Business has been good.”

The Leawood Carmen’s Café comes off as a prettier, if somewhat snootier, stepsister to the Brookside location. The original is much more relaxed, but the new venue has a charm of its own, a first-rate service staff and, most important, the same menu of Mediterranean (primarily Italian) dishes that the restaurant’s loyal midtown clientele loves.

And why wouldn’t they love it? The food at the Brookside Carmen’s has always been very good: delicious veal and beef dishes, a fine selection of tasty charbroiled chicken spiedini draped in a half-dozen luscious sauces, and modestly priced and satisfying pasta choices.

The Bautista brothers scratch a specific, satisfying niche. Neither Carmen’s tries to be a snazzy neighborhood hangout, like Gregg Johnson’s Osteria Il Centro, or a foodie mecca like the Mirabile family’s Jasper’s Restaurant. Instead, like its Brookside namesake, the Carmen’s in Leawood is a dimly lighted, intimate venue that evokes the cozy Italian restaurants of the 1940s and ’50s. You’d probably hear Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney even if their music wasn’t playing over the sound system.

“That’s the music our customers like,” says John Paul Balthazar, manager of the Leawood restaurant. (He started his culinary career as a teenage busboy at the original Carmen’s.) He’s careful to add that his space attracts more than just the Geritol generation. On my two visits to the new spot, the aubergine-colored dining room had drawn its patrons from a wide swath of the city: young couples with small, well-behaved children; baby boomers; and a few diners who have been eating fettuccine Alfredo and drinking Lambrusco since Sinatra and Clooney were not only still alive but also still recording hit records.

“It’s hard to imagine mentioning Little Italy and Leawood in the same sentence,” whispered Martha Mary, passing me the bread basket, “but there’s a reverence for Old World Italian here. And it helps that the servers are good-looking.”

Smart, too. If a server can’t fully describe the preparation of a dish here, he or she will fetch a manager or drag the chef out of the kitchen. On the night I dined with Martha Mary and Carol Ann, one of the spices in Carol Ann’s heaping bowl of paella Valenciana had us stumped. Was it cumin? Was it cinnamon? Before Carol Ann had a chance to peel another mussel from its shell, we were looking up to see one of the restaurant’s chefs, Amado Roman, and Balthazar toting a little plate of aromatic curry spices.

“We use a Spanish saffron in this dish,” Roman explained, “but the curry has a blend of spices with, maybe, a pinch of cinnamon.” We took turns sniffing the spices (I noticed a sour-looking woman across the dining room staring in our direction as if we were inhaling lines of cocaine) and asking questions about the paella — a signature dish of the Bautistas’ — before returning to our meals.

I have my favorites on the original Carmen’s menu, so I was interested to see how well they’d survived the transition. Although I’m never very interested in spaghetti and meatballs as an entrée (I grew up eating this economical staple of the Italian-American diet), I think a good meatball makes a fine solo dish. It’s also a good litmus test for a restaurant such as Carmen’s.

The meatballs here, made with beef tenderloin, are extraordinarily light. They have very little breading and are slow-simmered in the fresh-tasting house sugo. And they go well with fat slices of bread dipped in that sauce. (At Carmen’s, the bread is from Wyandotte County’s Bagel Works bakery.) After a single meatball and an ice-cold plate heaped with this restaurant’s superb house salad — a piquantly dressed mix of chilled greens, artichoke hearts, red onion, pimentos and parmesan cheese — I could barely finish more than a few bites of the main event: a grilled chicken breast smothered in a tart lemon-butter wine sauce.

So I leaned back in my chair and quietly listened to Carol Ann discuss, between bites of paella, her love life, which is infinitely more interesting than mine or even Martha Mary’s. Martha was more absorbed in her fork-tender hunks of beef tenderloin, grilled spiedini-style on skewers and blanketed in a supple Marsala sauce.

“Of course,” Carol Ann said, putting down her fork, “most of the men I’ve chatted with using online dating services have been, well, illiterate pigs. So, are we having dessert?”

Of course: tiramisu, imported from New York but indescribably good. So good, in fact, that I ordered it again on the night I dined with Michelle and Amy, who say Carmen’s Café may be the ultimate date restaurant. The menu is indeed filled with ingredients from the aphrodisiac food group: shellfish, asparagus, garlic, saffron, basil, olive oil, cream sauces.

We weren’t on a date, but we did share a couple of potentially seductive choices: grilled, bacon-wrapped shrimp, dripping in a fiery diablo sauce; and another variation on that theme, the gambas ala ajillo, glazed in a garlic-tomato-basil sauce.

Amy’s entrée was that night’s featured special: grilled lobster in a succulent champagne-cream sauce. It was a gorgeously rich dish. Michelle’s chicken Marsala was divine. I should have ordered it for myself instead of the Americanized version of fettuccine carbonara. Here, that dish turns out to be more of a bacon-adorned Alfredo.

Besides that great tiramisu, the sensuous desserts here include a creamy cheesecake (baked by a local woman who, outside the kitchen, works in a courthouse) and a silky flan created by a local Mexican man who supplies a few small restaurants and panaderias.

The Baustista brothers and their partners have spent more than a decade building a solid brand name with Carmen’s Café. Why shouldn’t they share it in different parts of the city? As long as their attention to detail remains this thorough, the new Carmen’s Café is set for a long run in Leawood.