Egg Inflation

Call it a coincidence, but on the same day that I filled the gas tank for $1.97 a gallon and grumbled about it all morning, I read a news story about a hotel restaurant in New York City offering a $1,000 lobster-and-caviar omelet. Before I could even ponder such insanity, I knocked a pile of old magazines off my desk, and right there, in a 1980 copy of Food & Wine magazine, I saw that history really does repeat itself.

In that issue, the magazine ran three retrospectives about the 1970s, starting with a column about the price of beef soaring so high that the Department of Consumer Affairs urged diners to cut out red meat one day a week, creating “Beefless Wednesday” as “a patriotic effort.” The second story was about food prices “biting back” — energy costs, distribution costs, labor costs and health costs were “making our favorite foods too expensive.” The steep gas prices (a gallon of gas peaked at 90 cents in ’79) had encouraged country-music songwriter Brent Burns to pen “Cheaper Crude or No More Food,” suggesting a food embargo of the OPEC countries. The recording sold 200,000 copies.

The third story was the most shocking for its time: New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne and a friend racking up a $4,000 dinner tab for 31 dishes and 9 wines at a Paris restaurant in 1975. It was a stunt so outlandishly hedonistic that even the Vatican commented on Claiborne’s indulgence.

I doubt that the Vatican would concern itself with my own recent affare dell’omelette, but here’s a confession: Last Sunday at the two-month-old Bluestem in Westport, I spent $8.50 on an omelet that was stuffed only with cherry tomatoes and boursin cheese. After adding a $4 cinnamon roll and a $5 bowl of granola, I really did start feeling sinful. But when I did the arithmetic in my head, my breakfast (including coffee and tip) ended up costing less than most Sunday-morning buffets — and its hipness quotient was definitely higher.

At Bluestem, husband-and-wife chefs Colby and Megan Garrelts seem to be pulling off their own stunt: operating a stylish, sexy magnet for the young and the restless and luring in the stuffier Mission Hills bourgeoisie.

The narrow restaurant, which seats just 43 customers (including five at the bar), was tidily packed with boldfaced names from The Independent on my first dinner outing to the restaurant, with friends Bob, Ben and perennial party girl Jennifer in tow. Jennifer, a chic fashion executive, is a convert to the Bluestem’s glamour. “Don’t you see?” she said conspiratorially. “It’s not like we’re in fucking Westport. This restaurant is something out of New York City.”

Broadway, maybe — every dish is as theatrically composed as a stage set, and the service is superbly attentive but glacially slow. “I liked the food a lot,” a rich, well-traveled friend of mine said later. “But who in the hell has three hours to spend on dinner on a weeknight? It was like sitting through Les Miserables. Pleasant but not exactly snappy.”

Bluestem’s servers are professional enough, so I suspect a lot of the delay between courses comes from Colby Garrelts fussing over each dish in the tiny kitchen. But even a request for hot tea elicited a performance on our first night. Justin, the server, brought out a heavy glass tray with nine votive-sized indentations, each filled with a different loose tea, ranging from an earthy black tea to the aromatic blend of gunpowder green tea, lemon myrtle, rose hips, laurel, and jasmine that I finally settled on.

[page]

After the tea ceremony came the amuse-bouche, a tiny, complimentary sampling of tastes. This one was the most elaborate I’d seen in a local restaurant. Colby’s trio of tongue tempters arrived on a glass dish with three small compartments. The first contained a miniature, origami-like construction of white asparagus tip topped with a crunchy sliver of radish and a snippet of magenta micro-spinach. The second was a shot glass filled with a jade-green juice of cucumber and pear. That was followed by a shimmery jelly square, slightly bigger than a Scrabble tile, molded around paper-thin grape slices and edged with blue cheese.

Next came two truly exquisite appetizers: a bowl of shiny, black Prince Edward Island mussels in a saffron broth, and a disc of satin-smooth foie gras glazed in a sauterne jelly and served with a puffy brioche and fig jam. Thank God they arrived when they did, because I was ravenous. I had passed on salad and was left to admire the delicate beauty of Ben’s pretty little construction of shaved fennel, wild strawberries and creamy dollops of mascarpone — the kind of salad that deserves to be painted before it’s eaten.

Before our entrées arrived, there was plenty of time for Bob to recite a monologue about hanging out in this same space during the early 1980s (he lived across the street, where Sonic now sits). Back then, it was the headquarters for a legendary antique dealer named Esther Bushman. After Bushman’s death, the place was home to numerous other tenants, most recently the short-lived New World Bistro. It was owned by a man who told friends of mine that he was going to “finally bring sophisticated cuisine to Kansas City,” but his restaurant didn’t last long enough for me to see whether he lived up to his pretensions.

The low-key Garreltses, however, are the real thing, serious connoisseurs of fine dining whose dinners are gorgeous: a succulent slab of wild salmon edged with spring peas and silky risotto, a superb strip of perfectly grilled beef glistening with mahogany-colored roasted onions, a moist roasted lamb that Jennifer devoured lustily. My own roasted spring rabbit, accompanied by a soothing chestnut polenta, was lusciously tender.

We didn’t stay for dessert, so I returned a few nights later just to sample something sweet after a friend of mine had rhapsodized over Megan’s skill with pastries. And talented she is, creating a “lemon bar” confection from a mouth-puckering citrus crème brûlée and a lighter-than-air malted-chocolate sponge pudding.

However, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I did a double take at the dinner bill on that first night.

Despite its high-end omelets, Sunday brunch is probably the most economical way to enjoy Bluestem, as evidenced by the completely different clientele lounging at the tables: a younger, laid-back, T-shirts-and-blue-jeans crowd. The mint-green dining room looks very different in the daylight, too — sunnier and more expansive though still quite glamorous. Then again, maybe it was my mood, which brightened considerably after a heaping bowl of house-made granola loaded with nuts, raisins, melon cubes and fat strawberries.

Bob, naturally, ordered the oddest breakfast, a bowl of mussels steamed in an apple-cider-and-leek broth and topped with a giant hunk of rustic bread, a honeyed apple compote and a wedge of brie cheese. The combination of flavors and textures sounded and looked too ridiculous for me to try, but Bob claimed it was one of the best things he’d ever eaten in his life, and the rest of the people in our party agreed.

[page]

We were with three of our fussiest, most critical friends — Lillis, Fred and Ned — and expected one or all of them to find fault with the room or the food. But they all loved it, leaving barely a crumb of Colby Garrelts’ version of eggs Benedict — an English muffin topped with smoked salmon and asparagus — or a ham-and-Gruyère open-faced croque-monsieur.

I never stopped eating from the moment I sat down, which was a good thing for the restaurant but not necessarily for me. Afterward, I caught my reflection in the plate-glass windows in front of the restaurant and had another epiphany. Gas prices aren’t the only figures that have increased since 1979.