Tannahs moves to sweeten Leawood

Paradise has a new name — in Leawood, anyway. A few months ago, husband-and-wife restaurateurs Nathan and Mendy Tannahill took over the venue abandoned by Cheeseburger in Paradise, the Jimmy Buffet-inspired restaurant chain, and moved — lock, stock and upholstered booths — their “Asian fusion” restaurant, Tannahs, from its original location in Olathe.

The Leawood spot is much bigger and distinctly more glamorous. There’s no longer a shiny-steel exhibition kitchen behind a big glass window. The dining room is now a stylish curve, wrapped around a central bar that fronts a great span of sunny windows. It’s a pretty space with a layout that diffuses sound, an improvement on the noisy original (“More Than Sum,” May 29, 2008).

I dined solo on my first visit to the new Tannahs, enjoying a generous bowl of delicately seasoned curry rice while watching the well-trained staff fuss over the clientele. According to one server, the new customers are “very different from our customers in Olathe.” She wouldn’t elaborate on what that meant.

Maybe the restaurant’s newly abbreviated name has something to do with it. A year ago, the Olathe location was called Tannahs Asian Fusion. Now it’s simply Tannahs, and curious walk-ins must read the business cards on the hostess stand for an explanation: “Asian Gourmet with an American Twist.”

That American touch can be twisted, all right, but the Tannahills mostly do right by their idiosyncratic spin on the culinary traditions of China, Thailand, Hawaii and Italy. Italy? Well, there is an “Asian Alfredo noodles” dish on the Tannahs menu that would probably have Alfredo di Lelio — the Italian restaurateur credited with “inventing” the dish of pasta, Parmesan cheese and butter — rolling in his grave. If I had been forced to eat more than a few bites of this wildly eccentric dish, I think I would have been rolling in mine.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just say Tannahs puts its own imaginative imprint on a familiar ethnic repertoire, not unlike the P.F. Chang’s chain, which successfully turns out modern variations on the old Chinese-American dishes. Tannahs, with chef Travis Fell in the kitchen, is a lot more creative, and most of what he turns out succeeds.

Take, for example, the classic American snack, the Buffalo chicken wing. First created at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, in 1964, it’s a deceptively simple dish: deep-fried chicken wings slathered in cayenne hot sauce. At Tannahs, the invention of Anchor co-owner Teressa Bellissimo gets the “Asian Gourmet” treatment, which means the wings come with a choice of six house-made sauces, including teriyaki and “atomic.”

On the night I dined with Peter and wings-loving Rachel, we argued over how fiery we wanted our wings. Atomic was definitely out, but the version made with potent Sriracha sauce sounded intriguing. Rachel finally decided on “spicy Hawaiian,” which I assume must have had some pineapple juice in it. The wings, which were wonderful, tasted considerably more sweet than spicy (though they weren’t the meatiest, I’m sad to report). That’s one of the little quirks of the fare at Tannahs: A lot of the dishes lean toward the sweet.

That certainly goes for “candy shrimp,” which arrive glistening in a thick, sugary glaze alongside candied walnuts and pieces of honeydew melon. When I tasted it a year ago, at the old location, I nearly fell into an insulin coma. But there are other, more deceptively sweet offerings, such as the egg drop fusion soup. For the record, I detest egg drop soup in almost any incarnation — it’s usually gloppy, visually unappealing and bland. The version at Tannahs looks terrific, dappled with creamed corn, peas and bits of chopped carrot. And it wasn’t bland — after the first sip, I cringed at its jarring sweetness. “It’s the creamed corn,” our server confessed. “People love it or hate it.”

Count me among the latter. The waiter graciously exchanged it for a cup of the hot and sour soup (a mild, peppery broth laden with bits of chicken) and, for Peter, a cup of first-rate tomato basil soup. The cilantro garnish was a little overpowering — and unnecessary — with the creamy tomato basil concoction, but it was so soothing and comforting that Rachel wished that we could have had a grilled cheese sandwich with it. (As it turned out, we could have. Grilled cheese is on the children’s menu, and, apparently, a childless adult who asks nicely can get one.)

And you can still get a cheeseburger where Cheeseburger in Paradise used to be. Tannahs serves a Kobe beef patty on a ciabbata bun with “Szechuan aioli.” There are more cultural influences mixed up in that sandwich than the gift shop at Epcot. Even the Kansas City strip steak, a big seller here, is served sliced on a puddle of mushroom-and-teriyaki-based “Mongolian steak sauce.” Yes, history notes that the great Genghis Khan and his ferocious Mongol warriors ate plenty of meat, but even the most encyclopedic accounts generally fail to mention steak sauce.

The steak, which is inexpensive, is also very, very good: tender, beautifully cooked, juicy. But why is chef Fell serving it with a pile of overcooked, tasteless cubes of deep-fried breakfast potatoes? These are the kinds of spuds found in a third-rate diner, not sided with some beautifully grilled asparagus and a decent steak. Peter thought the horrible, chewy little cubes ruined an otherwise perfect meal.

Rachel had — inexplicably, if you ask me — high hopes for that Asian Alfredo, described on the menu as “rice noodles tossed in our coconut-infused Alfredo sauce.” Rachel loved the spicy shrimp in the dish but thought the noodles were flavorless. I love coconut but not in an ersatz “Alfredo” sauce. That isn’t a meal — it’s a novelty act.

I was much happier with my own meal, one of the “From the Wok” selections that permit patrons to mix their choice of meat, seafood, poultry or tofu with one of the kitchen’s 17 featured sauces. I opted for duck with “silk spicy,” the signature creation here, described on the menu as “sweet chili sauce, caramelized onions and snow peas.” It’s certainly silky in texture but not very spicy. And the onions were most assuredly not caramelized — they were barely cooked.

The desserts, none of which are made in-house, are beautiful. The triple-chocolate cheesecake was exquisitely rich, and the hot fried crust around the custardy banana, lavishly dusted with cinnamon and sugar, offered a neat counterpoint to the enormous scoop of great vanilla-bean ice cream.

There was no decorative cherry on the ice cream, but if we had wanted one, Peter had nearly a dozen to choose from at the bottom of his Manhattan cocktail. “It’s like the bartender dumped the dregs of a bottle of maraschino cherries into the glass,” Peter said with a laugh.

At the multicultural Tannahs, the word sweet is magic in any language.

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