Newport Grill summons PB&J’s glory days

I really believed that I would never again witness the tableside presentation of lobster soufflé. Once a staple of high-drama restaurants, that dish long ago joined steak Diane and cherries jubilee on the list of fine dining’s spectral remnants. But last weekend, I saw a ghost: a lobster soufflé, at the three-month-old Newport Grill in Overland Park, hustled out by the chef himself.

Paul Clinton emerged from his kitchen, holding aloft a bright-orange Le Creuset pan. He split open the steaming, savory puff with a spoon and poured into the dish’s center a Lobster à l’Américaine sauce: a creamy concoction of tomatoes, white wine, cognac, shallots, and fat chunks of poached and buttered Maine lobster. It was an exhilarating spectacle, and I was glad to see it because this particular indulgence, I decided, was for me — at $30, it wasn’t cheap. And how was it? Moist, insanely rich, altogether worth it.

Still, the lobster soufflé as an idea is a relic. The powers that be at Newport Grill weren’t sure just how the public would respond in this era of fast-casual, economy-minded dining. When the restaurant opened, the kitchen had five of those round Le Creuset pans. A week later, Clinton ordered 30 more.

The success of the lobster soufflé here represents the reunion of old-school restaurant sensibilities and a clientele ready to embrace certain bygone notions with disarming fervor. PB&J Restaurants, the 27-year-old operation behind Newport, seemed well past what many thought was its creative high point: the flagship Grand Street Café, which the company sold in 2003. But after a fallow spell, PB&J co-founder Paul Khoury (business partner Bill Crooks sold his interest in the company several years ago) is opening new high-concept restaurants again, both in the metro and outside the state. And with Newport, the company may have found its footing again.

Khoury opened his first Newport in Wichita in 2010, luring one of Kansas City’s best restaurant managers, Joe Wilcox (the longtime general manager at Plaza III), to move there and oversee the property. When the decision was made to open a second Newport Grill in the PrairieFire development, Wilcox returned to Kansas City. He has staffed the new restaurant with a phalanx of smart veteran servers in crisp white shirts and silky ties the color of the Aegean Sea. It’s a polished staff for a slick-looking dining room (designed by Hal Swanson, who launched his career with Grand Street Café in 1991) that’s all tobacco-stained oak, Italian-tile floors and sage-colored fabric walls.

Newport Grill isn’t a fancy restaurant, but it conveys an honest elegance. And it may be the only seafood place in the metro that’s ready to serve a whole 4-pound, lemon-stuffed Kampachi. Caught in Hawaii, it’s flown to Kansas City, roasted in Newport’s wood-fired oven and served — steaming and fragrant — for $95. (It serves more than a couple of people.)

“People don’t blink an eye,” Wilcox says of that dish. “If we’ve got it, they want it.”

I blinked and took a more penny-pinching approach that night, ordering another Hawaiian catch: a meaty, dense and delicious blue marlin that Clinton had discreetly brushed with a chili-pineapple glaze. The idea is for the flavor of the grilled fish to stand on its own, so the chef isn’t heavy-handed with his palette of sauces, salsas and emulsions — such as the evanescent citrus butter on the Georges Bank scallops and the swath of jade artichoke purée just bordering fat pillows of supple, seared mollusks.

Clinton’s white, flaky Chilean sea bass is presented like a precious gemstone, unadorned but for a splash of grilled-lemon vinaigrette the night I sampled it. At least a dozen fresh dishes are featured each night, with a lusciously oily (but not so flavorful) monchong and a sockeye salmon (which Clinton frequently encrusts with horseradish and almonds) selling out fairly quickly on weekends.

Vegetarians are limited here to side dishes, but there are a lot of them. The cheesy “brulee” potatoes are almost criminally addictive, with or without fish nearby. Those who prefer red meat have a few options, including a fantastically tender filet mignon blanketed in a shiny, jammy zinfandel demi-glace. It would be a stellar cut in any steakhouse. I also liked a bowl of fresh pappardelle pasta that came in a satiny cream sauce of mushroom and blue cheese, with pickled golden raisins and a mound of fork-tender short ribs. That’s a lot of discordant flavors, yes, but the dish, taken as a whole, is excellent.

The lunch menu is less extravagant but not less rewarding. My favorite midday plate tucks pieces of fragile black cod into golden, feather-light sheaths of Boulevard-beer batter. If you ask nicely, you can get it for dinner, too; it’s also on the Paradise Diner menu, and the venues share a kitchen.

I could have cobbled together a fine meal from a couple of appetizers. Clinton’s version of rumaki wraps crispy bacon around pieces of beef tenderloin and jack cheese, with good results. The creamy clam chowder is light on spuds and sensible on the clams but maybe too heavy on the bacon.

Wilcox and Clinton are proud of the puffy beignets on the Newport Grill dessert menu (they’re messy but very tasty), but a hunk of butter cake, topped with a scoop of malted-caramel ice cream, outpaces those delicate fried squares and is easier to share.

And really, this place is about those old-school touches, like that soufflé and that butter cake. You can order shrimp cocktail here, along with a great wedge salad. Yes, there’s also “surf and turf”: a $58 pairing of an 8-ounce filet and a 10-ounce lobster tail. This approach is what the PB&J restaurants represented two decades ago, when style and substance were delectably intertwined. With Newport Grill, there is once again a place that feels grand without all the, you know, grandeur.