A Small World

During the 1960s, the area south of 85th and Wornall felt as if it were out in the country. Elsie Lavish, who has lived in the same South Kansas City house for 45 years, remembers the neighborhood when it was scattered with “ponds and vacant lots” instead of houses, strip shopping centers and highway exits. A nearby restaurant was all the rage. The Mark-Ninety Drive-In served “little burgers smothered in onions, like White Castles but on a bigger bun,” Lavish recalls. “The kids adored it.”

Today, at the sixteen-year-old Kabob House, Middle Eastern meals and appetizers are prepared in the same tiny kitchen where grill cooks once hovered over those onion-flavored burgers. One of the Kabob House’s dishes might even be able to pass for a long, narrow burger: A concoction of grilled ground beef and onion called koobideh at Kabob House (or kubideh in Persian cookbooks) looks like a skinny version of what old-fashioned diners used to call “hamburger steak.”

The only thing missing is the ketchup. Instead, diners at Kabob House can dip their meat in a little plastic cup of sour cream and cucumber or douse it with a spoonful or two of must and khiar — yogurt and chopped cucumber. But nobody better ask for ketchup, or the server will blanch and say, “Never.”

The neighborhood has long since lost its rural sensibility, becoming a gritty, unabashedly blue-collar scene. In a way, though, Kabob House is as perfect a fit for these days as a drive-in was in the 1960s. This no-frills restaurant mixes up the ambience of a neighborhood joint and the culinary traditions of pre-Ayatollah Iran.

No ketchup? Who cares! When in Persepolis or in South Kansas City, eat as the natives do. With its eight booths and four tables, Kabob House’s tiny dining room doesn’t boast much in the way of exotic décor — the stainless-steel steam table, used only during the lunch buffet, is the dominant sculptural element. But the southern wall has been cleverly painted in trompe l’oeil fashion, in a vaguely Assyrian motif, to look like an ancient wall with a faux window opening out onto a palace garden. The uncloaked tables are decorated with vases full of fresh flowers.

Glamour is in short supply at this restaurant — napkins are paper, the flowers in the hanging baskets are fake, and there’s a TV set over the bar. That bar is stocked with plenty of beers and wines; in the absence of mixed drinks, White Zinfandel has become a popular choice of diners who want to splurge on a little alcohol.

The place is dearly beloved by my most frugal friends. “It’s good, it’s cheap and they don’t give a crap what we’re wearing,” says Ben, a longtime regular. “When I go out to eat, I don’t want to run into people I know. I want to eat and talk to my wife and ignore everyone else in the restaurant.”

But be warned: The dining room is small enough that it’s easy to eavesdrop on fellow patrons. At one nearby table, a rich kid was taking his pals out to dinner on his father’s credit card. “Don’t thank me,” he said, winking, after paying the bill. “Thank my dad. He’s getting a massage on a plane to London right now.”

A wealthy man’s credit card can come in handy here, because though the dinners are moderately priced (only one entrée costs more than $17), the tab can add up if a table full of friends starts ordering appetizers. For sharing, the big steel appetizer platter — with its three shiny stuffed grape leaves, a puddle of garlicky hummus and a mound of greenish-brown kishk badenjan — makes sense. The badenjan, a blend of broiled eggplant, sautéed onions, garlic and kishk (powdered whey), has a potent eggplant flavor, but the color and consistency may turn off some diners; it looks more, um, organic than appetizing.

I wasn’t afraid to dip a piece of crispy Persian flatbread into the eggplant-flavored glop, but my dining companions wouldn’t touch the stuff. Then again, they were unworldly enough to be shocked by the restaurant’s distinctive unleavened bread. No grilled pita here; this bread was the thickness of a paper towel and came cut in small rectangles. It was perfect for sopping up hummus or wrapping around a bit of feta cheese.

“But bland,” sniffed my friend Jeanne. “Bland like the dips. Flavorless.”

Jeanne thought the stuffed grape leaves (which looked like miniature Turkish ottomans) were “jarringly sweet,” but I loved this variation on the oily Greek dolmas. The little pillows were filled to near-bursting with a pumpkin-colored blend of ground beef, rice, lentils and a splash of tomato sauce.

Dinners come with the uncomplicated Shirazi salad, a jumble of romaine lettuce, a tomato wedge, a few onions and cucumber, all of it doused in olive oil, lemon juice and dried dill. There’s one other salad dressing: creamy ranch. That was good enough for one of Jeanne’s girls, my ten-year-old goddaughter, who thought Kabob House was “awesome” and amazed me by slathering the fragile, papery flatbread with butter (“Why not — it’s bread, isn’t it?”) and devouring it. Her bratty older sister — a Chicken McNugget junkie — looked with horror at the bread, the dips, the salad and her kabob’s neon-orange grilled chicken.

Our waiter insisted that it was saffron that had turned these chicken nuggets into gold. There wasn’t much pungent saffron flavor in them, though. They’d probably been sprinkled with an adulterated version or a powdered blend, because pure saffron remains one of the world’s most expensive spices.

Still, the chicken was moist, plump and tender. So was the filet mignon in her little sister’s shish kabob, brought out on a sizzling metal plate. Under its slightly smoky surface, each fat cube was lusciously pink and juicy.

Jeanne was impressed. She thought her own broiled filet was as good as that at any upscale steak house, though I suspect she would have preferred Lea & Perrin’s steak sauce — or ketchup — to a cooling dollop of sour cream and cucumber.

My Soltani (or “royal”) combination of yogurt-marinated lamb kabobs and ground beef koobideh came with a massive pile of fluffy basmati rice. But diners with more Midwestern tastes can order it sided by a foil-wrapped baked potato.

The menu may not pass as standard fare in the Middle East, but Kabob House is, after all, in the heart of meat-loving Kansas City. The service is genial but often harried. (I’ve never seen more than one waiter working at any one time.) The booths are cramped enough that post-dinner lingering — even over cheesecake or saffron rice pudding — is an uncomfortable prospect. Diners in desperate need of a more hard-hitting after-dinner cocktail can saunter next door to the venerable Polk-a-Dot Lounge.

Though her neighborhood has changed over the years, Elsie Lavish says Kabob House looks exactly like the old Mark-Ninety Drive-In used to look. And whether it’s a burger or a koobideh, a good hunk of grilled beef is timeless.