Brunch goes big at these six restaurants

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but at some point in the mid-1990s, buffet brunches – the big, fancy affairs with ice sculptures, hand-carved roast beef, bowls of peel-and-eat shrimp, and tables groaning with plates of pretty desserts – began to fall out of favor. Buffet brunches are costly to produce; that’s why the restaurants offering the nicest ones were often in hotels, which could afford to maintain them as a nice example of public relations. They weren’t moneymakers. They were loss leaders.

For years, the snazziest brunch in town was the $29 meal presented, with great fanfare, by the former Benton’s Prime Steakhouse, atop the Westin Crown Center hotel. Sadly, that restaurant no longer exists. The last ice sculpture melted back in 2011.

If you absolutely must have a lavishly outfitted buffet brunch with that larger-than-life 1970s sensibility (a chocolate fountain and fresh strawberries, for example), there’s always the $16.99 champagne brunch served on Saturday and Sunday at the Horizons Buffet at the Ameristar Casino (3200 North Ameristar Drive, 816-414-7000). This brunch is offered from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. 
Most restaurants offering brunch in the metro prefer serving an off-the-menu meal that combines both breakfast and lunch choices. But even if some popular Sunday buffets have been unceremoniously dropped from the schedule (the M&S Grill on the Country Club Plaza stopped serving its Sunday buffet a year ago), the buffet brunch isn’t exactly a dinosaur yet. Bucking the trend to offer a menu-only repast, the new midtown location of Nick & Jake’s (5031 Main, 816-421-1111) begins serving a buffet starting Sunday, June 1, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Nick & Jake’s managing partner Larry Kime says the brunch details are still coming together (“It will be priced between $16 and $18,” he says), but the spread will feature a made-to-order omelet station, several traditional egg dishes, French toast, pasta, a meat dish and various sweets.

James Beard Award – winning chef Colby Garrelts has never masked his distaste for buffet brunches: “I like my food to be cooked to order, not just sitting out there,” he says.

Garrelts has always offered a menu-only brunch at his two restaurants: Rye (10551 Mission, 913-642-5800) and Bluestem (900 Westport Road, 816-561-1101). The latter is scheduled to reopen for business May 31, following a renovation. Garrelts says brunch returns June 1.

Formal buffet brunches – the stuffy hotel variety – have definitely been supplanted by more raucous environments. If there were an award for the loudest brunch in the metro – and, possibly, the most festive – it would go to chef Patrick Ryan’s Port Fonda (4141 Pennsylvania, 816-216-6462), which serves the menu-only meal from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday and, in keeping with the vibrant, south-of-the-border spirit of the place, offers a “Build-Your-Own Bloody Maria Bar.”

But if a more soothing ambience is required on a Sunday morning (when nursing a case of the morning-after “mean reds,” as Holly Golightly called them), there’s the intimate but tasteful dining room at Café Europa (323 East 55th Street, 816-523-1212), where many of the patrons arriving between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. for the menu-only brunch have come directly from church. That doesn’t preclude these devout diners from enjoying a cocktail with their huckleberry pancakes and bacon; they just sup a little more softly.

And a soft, mellow morning trumps an ice sculpture any day of the week.