A Bit Prickly

One of my shortest restaurant jobs was at a Mexican joint back in the 1970s. I was fired after working there barely a week. Not for the usual reasons (bad attitude, skipping out on side work) but for something much more dramatic: I was having a fling with one of the other servers and decided to end the so-called “relationship” in the middle of a Saturday-night shift.

Yes, it was a thoughtless and dumb move on my part, and I deserved having a tray of cheese enchiladas and a couple of extra-large margaritas thrown at me by the spurned server. It was so humiliating that I never applied for a job in a Mexican restaurant again. It was a long time before I could even eat in one.

Anyway, my sympathetic friends assured me, “You’re too good for that kind of restaurant.” In those days, ambitious waiters didn’t seek out jobs in Mexican restaurants. For the most part, they weren’t glamorous places, and the average customer didn’t rack up much of a check; to make any real dough, you had to turn a lot of tables, which could be grueling. The flip side of the peso was that they were considered fun places to work because the food and the ambience were casual, and, after a few potent margaritas, even notoriously stingy customers left generous tips.

I like to think of myself as a generous tipper even without tequila. But one of the waiters at the two-month-old Cactus Grill in Prairie Village had me seeing rojo when he dropped the dinner check before my companion had finished eating; moreover, he didn’t even mention dessert. I was so appalled that I couldn’t leave more than 15 percent.

I might have been more tolerant of the unpolished service if I didn’t have so much respect for this restaurant’s manager, Bill Ridgway, who is pretty demanding of his crew. I know this because I’ve watched him in action for nearly two decades. Back in 1989, he was on the staff of the first Jose Pepper’s restaurant, on 103rd Street in Overland Park. This was the original suburban cantina created by a young entrepreneur named Ed Gieselman, who now owns six Jose Pepper’s restaurants and two of the more upscale Cactus Grills.

It’s been years since I’ve eaten in a Jose Pepper’s, but my friends consider them to be kind of lowbrow, on the level of a chain such as On the Border Mexican Grill and Cantina. The Cactus Grills are perceived to have a little more cachet, perhaps, because they’re located in tonier neighborhoods and serve more seafood dishes and salads than a traditional Mexican restaurant. But upscale? Nah.

Ridgway doesn’t describe the new Cactus Grill that way, but he does admit that the clientele, which includes a lot of customers from Mission Hills and the Ward Parkway corridor, is picky about service.

Before my encounter with this Cactus Grill’s impetuous server, I had two dinners there with excellent servers and damned good food — including some extravagantly rich dishes not seen in most Tex-Mex joints. This Cactus Grill probably isn’t going to pull any business away from the venerable, family-owned cantinas on Southwest Boulevard, but it does a first-rate job of serving solid, made-from-scratch Mexican-American dishes to a specific community: retired couples and families with young children. On all of my visits, the restaurant was noisy with toddlers — and the staff was amazingly patient and accommodating to that fidgety, demanding clientele.

I was kind of fidgety and demanding myself, at least on my first visit with Franklin and Deb. I had been too busy to eat lunch that day, so by the time we sat down in the bright, colorful dining room, I was ravenous. Our server hustled out with some warm, tissue-weight corn chips and a bowl of espinaca con queso, the house spinach-and-cheese dip, which was a little bland for my taste.

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“Look at the customers here,” Franklin said. “Kids and geriatrics. They don’t want anything too hot or spicy.”

I was also fighting a cold, so I wanted something spicy and comforting, which I got in abundance: a fine chicken-tortilla soup, just peppery enough to open my sinuses, and a green salad heaped with grilled chicken, more tortilla strips and a curative honey-lime vinaigrette.

Franklin could barely make a dent in the fat burrito he ordered, and Deb raved about the sautéed shrimp in her shrimp tacos. When she, too, had to request a takeout box, she complained that American restaurants give diners too much food. (Deb lived in Australia for a decade.)

Yes, that’s one of the things I like best about living in the U.S.A.: big food. And when I went back to the Cactus Grill a few weeks later with Marilyn, we even opted for a big starter! Steak-and-goat-cheese towers sounded like something dramatic and vertical but turned out to be a couple of grilled-tenderloin-and-cheese burritos cut in half and served horizontally with a sassy chipotle aïoli. We had to beg a couple of passing servers for side plates so we could share the appetizer — why wouldn’t that idea just occur to a waiter?

Marilyn loves Mexican food, but she found the vast array of potential choices to be daunting. Should she order the traditional fajitas? A combo platter? One of the oddball items, such as the Baja BLT or the Desert Bowtie Pasta? Our server talked her into a combo platter with a cheese-and-spinach enchilada, a chicken taco and a feta-cheese tostada. Nothing like a little Mediterranean accent on a standard Tex-Mex creation.

I ordered the pork carnitas, and the kitchen knew how to do them right: braised and simmered with green chiles and tomatoes. The burrito filled with that tender pork was excellent, smothered in a punchy chile verde and jalapeño cream cheese.

“We have fried ice cream,” our server announced as she cleared away the plates. Marilyn rolled her eyes as if saying, “To hell with that idea.” After such a heavy meal, one really needs to be in the right frame of mind to contemplate a deep-fried dessert.

But at least this server mentioned dessert, unlike that harried waiter on my third visit to the Cactus Grill.

That night, Bob overheard the same server describe that night’s dinner special to two tables with this caveat: “I don’t really like it myself.”

It wasn’t the best sales technique, but I kind of admired his honesty. Bob, also an ex-waiter, disagreed. “If he feels that way, why mention it at all?”

Cactus Grill has its eccentricities, I guess, in its waitstaff and on its menu. For dinner, I ordered the VooDoo Tuna Tostada, which turned out to be one of the weirdest things I’d ever tasted. This hunk of pillowy, chewy, deep-fried “Navajo” bread, topped with a grilled hunk of tuna and heaped with bits of red cabbage, yellow corn, tomato and feta cheese, then doused with “gazpacho crema,” works better as a modern art piece than as a meal. Bob made a better choice with another house specialty, the Creamy Steak Enchiladas. They were heavy on the crema, all right: jalapeño cream cheese inside the tortilla and chipotle cream sauce and sour cream on top.

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It’s one of the top-selling dinners here, which suggests that the Cactus Grill has found its niche selling rich food to rich people at a modest price. Who needs dessert?