Snob Story
When the economy went sour in the late ’80s, a kind of culinary artistry called nouvelle cuisine — dinner as a tiny but visually elegant creation — fell out of favor faster than the decade’s other over-the-top trends, including Boy George and Dynasty. Suddenly, lowbrow comfort food was stylish again, with hefty portions of unglamorous, homestyle dishes replacing those bite-sized, high-fashion affairs.
The only dainty, elegantly composed food that continued to grow in popularity was sushi, that Japanese import of fresh, raw fish artfully perched on a finger of vinegared rice or rolled into a sheet of nori seaweed. Even today, with the economic cycle in another slump, sushi — which isn’t exactly a bargain — has gone from being an exotic luxury to something stocked in refrigerator cases at suburban supermarkets.
Japanese cuisine — sushi, sashimi, sukiyaki — may be less nouvelle these days, but it’s a nice counterpoint to Kansas City cooking. When my friend Becky came home from New York City (along with her musician boyfriend, David) to spend Thanksgiving with her mother, they paid homage at the local temples of comfort food, eating fried chicken at Stroud’s, barbecue at Gates, a thick steak at the City Tavern and even indulging in an all-you-can-eat orgy at the Old Country Buffet. But by the following week, they were ready for something different.
No holiday decorations were competing with the paper lanterns and neon signs at Westport’s Matsu Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar, but traditional holiday music was wafting out of the dining rooms’ hidden speakers. We heard everything but “Blue Christmas,” which might have been a good choice — the temperature inside the place was hotter than the beach at Waikiki.
Last year, Matsu expanded into the long, narrow space formerly occupied by the Tivoli Theater and, before that, another art house, the Bijou. There’s not a relic left of the former storefront theater, but lots of memories linger.
“This is where I used to come and see midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with all my high-school friends,” Becky said. An hour earlier, she had rolled her eyes at the idea of eating sushi in the middle of Kansas City.
“It’s snobbery on my part, I admit it,” she said, poring over the slender paper menu. “I’m used to eating sushi on the coasts.”
Becky had tasted sushi for the first time on the West Coast. All by herself at a hotel sushi counter, she’d ordered the most familiar-sounding item, a California roll, made with crabmeat, avocado and cucumber. She’d barely given a second glance to the accompaniments, a little pink pile of vinegared ginger and a pale-green blob of wasabi. After she had eaten each slice of the roll, she pondered the wasabi, decided it was a bit of leftover avocado and popped the entire burning lump into her mouth.
“And then I raced around the hotel lobby screaming,” she said, laughing. Becky has since become a sushi sophisticate, and she motioned for the waiter and ordered some spicy tuna rolls, unagi (eel, brushed with a mahogany barbecue sauce) and a tempura shrimp roll.
The server looked familiar to me, but not from another restaurant. Was it from the movies? Tousle-haired and wrapped in a happi coat, he looked like 1950s teen heartthrob Tommy Kirk!
“Ah, yes,” said David, looking up from his menu and remembering Kirk. “He was in The Shaggy Dog with Annette Funicello.” Along with dozens of other films that probably never played the old Tivoli, including Mother Goose a Go-Go and It’s a Bikini World.
The server seemed nonplussed by our observation. And everything else. He did talk me out of the sukiyaki, however. “It’s OK if you like sweet things,” he said. I don’t, so I ordered the charbroiled, barbecued pork. For Carol, Becky’s sushi-wary mother, I had him bring a platter of tempura shrimp and vegetables. Carol was thrilled with the heap of golden-fried puffs perched on a mound of crispy, white rice noodles.
“This looks delicious,” she said, picking up what appeared to be a paper-thin slice of fried squash. “But what is it?”
“Just eat it,” I commanded, grabbing a fried shrimp off of her plate for myself. I had already finished a steaming bowl of fragrant miso soup and a gorgeous little salad compressed into a baseball-sized cup, the lettuce and chopped carrots cold and crisp and drenched in a tart dressing.
Becky and David dropped their coastal snobbery as soon as the sushi arrived. The pieces were arranged on a wooden tray like jewels in a Tiffany case. Particularly beautiful were the four ikura, each topped with a thick cluster of salmon roe that glistened like topaz beads.
“It’s wonderful,” Becky said, expertly wielding her chopsticks. “I’m ashamed I was so provincial about sushi in Missouri. It’s as good as New York. Cheaper, too.” (Dinner at Matsu may be much less costly than in Manhattan, but the tab is nonetheless a jolt to Kansas City sensibilities.)
David’s combination platter of California roll with chicken teriyaki didn’t exactly put him in a New York state of mind, though. We agreed that the soggy pile of stir-fried chicken chunks, red and yellow peppers and onion was a clunker visually as well as in flavor. “It’s boring,” he said.
The barbecued pork was much more exciting. Thin strips of grilled meat arrived sizzling hot, slathered with a thick, garlicky hoisin sauce and enfolded in a cool lettuce wrapper.
It was so wonderful that I ordered the barbecued beef ribs on another visit, this time with friends Peter and Jeff. But these little discs of beef weren’t very meaty or tender. Peter, loosened up by a glass of cold, sugary plum wine, liked his fried, breaded pork cutlet splashed with a dark, fruity sauce — but I thought it tasted more like soul food than, say, Seoul food. Even the alligator tempura roll had a vaguely Louisianan flavor, its fried alligator, crab and avocado tucked in with bean sprouts.
With no savvy waiter to talk him out of it, Jeff enthusiastically ordered the sukiyaki stew and seemed delighted when the little metal pot arrived, the broth bubbling with milky chunks of tofu and thin curls of beef. He fished transparent cellophane noodles and bits of onion and peppers from the vinegary-sweet soup but tired of the dish after the first few bites. When I suggested that perhaps sukiyaki was an acquired taste, he snapped, “It’s an unacquired taste. The more you eat it, the less you like it.”
But that’s the exception to the rule at Matsu, where the food is often delectably seductive. On one visit, our group couldn’t help but stare at the young couple perched at the sushi counter, feeding each other nigari sushi topped with bright pink shrimp and gazing lustfully into each other’s eyes. It was just like watching a movie.
