A Savvy Savoy
The best-known table in the Savoy Grill‘s main room is Booth 4, the center booth closest to the western wall. This comfortably upholstered nook contained Harry Truman’s favorite table, and to this day it’s the most-requested spot in the restaurant. Considerably less popular is Table 31, the second four-top to the left of the revolving door, close to the bar and in front of a big wooden column. But this was the favorite table of the late millionaire and philanthropist Richard Stern, who always insisted on sitting at “his” table.
“Richard liked this table because he could see everyone as they came in and he could hold court,” says my friend Marilyn, who knew Stern well. “And he was never too far from a chilled martini.” Marilyn prefers Table 31 as well. Though it’s a shade too close to the bar, which can get pretty smoky on a weekend night, it’s certainly not too far away from Damon, the handsome, dark-haired bartender.
Many of Kansas City’s larger-than-life personalities have been equally possessive of downtown’s 99-year-old Savoy Grill, which is not quite as old as the 1888 hotel that contains it. The late “Flo” Stevens, founder of the Patricia Stevens Fashion College empire, insisted on the Truman booth, where she would cherish a Pall Mall and a Scotch before slicing into a steak au poivre.
Little has changed in the Grill’s celebrated front room, which still boasts its original Edward Holslag murals, distinctive gold-and-green art-nouveau glass windows and a carved oak bar dating back to the McKinley administration. So it’s no surprise that cigarette smoking is as much a tradition here as the servers’ crisp white jackets and their numbered, silvery pins.
Numbers 1 and 2 are long-retired, though. The former belonged to Leiman Childs, who served thick steaks and baked potatoes in the room from 1950 to 1975; the latter was worn by the late Bill Bass, who retired in 1972 after 52 years of service.
The numbers are much higher now. The server who fussed over Marilyn the night we went out was Number 28, the plump and effusive Curtis Hough, a six-year veteran of the restaurant. He immediately handed Marilyn (but not me, alas) a printed invitation to his upcoming birthday party. “I’m going to have celebrities there!” he gushed. “Bette, Judy and Liza!”
“Isn’t Judy Garland dead?” I asked, unfolding a starched napkin into my lap.
“She’s coming back! Just for my party,” giggled Curtis, proving that at the Savoy, the serving staff has as much celebrity cachet as the patrons. That tradition goes back to the legendary Mr. Childs — Server Number 1 — who had to leave town quite quickly, according to the hotel’s owner, Don Lee. “He had a huge customer following,” Lee says. But one night domestic problems caught up with him and, Lee says, Childs “slipped out the back door.”
What hasn’t been so legendary in recent years is the restaurant’s food. Lately I’ve heard it knocked more often than praised; the most typical complaints are that it’s “inconsistent and too expensive.” Expensive? Perhaps — the prices are comparable to those at the Capital Grille, though unlike that Plaza establishment, the Savoy includes salads and potatoes in its dinner prices. But inconsistent?
I decided to investigate and came to this conclusion: The food is still delicious, but the kitchen can be uneven in odd little ways. One Sunday, the kitchen ran out of hot yeast rolls, the ingredients for a Caesar salad and the Rum Baba Flambe before 8 p.m. And diners should make a point of telling their servers in advance if they have theater tickets, because nothing comes out of the kitchen promptly, and the lag between salad and entrée can be maddening.
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That said, I recently had two sensational meals at the Savoy. At the first, Marilyn, my friend Bob and I sat at the unlegendary Table 31, where we stuffed ourselves silly on meaty shrimps de Jonghe, which came lounging in a pool of rich garlic-butter sauce; then we slathered real butter onto moist, glazed cinnamon rolls before we started on our salads. At the Savoy, a Caesar is still prepared tableside, the server driving a rattling cart loaded with all the necessary accoutrements and throwing them together with varying degrees of theatrics.
No one can call the Savoy stingy with its portions or even its ingredients: the Caesar is potent with fresh garlic; and if you’re a fan of blue cheese, the kitchen staff will happily sprinkle a mountain of Roquefort crumbles on the house salad. “It’s a blue-cheese salad,” Marilyn noted, “with lettuce on the side.”
The broiled lobster tails are so large they seem to be relics of some Jurassic-era crustacean. A ravenous Bob ate the two tails that came with his dinner and still took half my top sirloin steak because “lobster and steak really taste fabulous together.” The Savoy promotes that same theory, offering varying combinations of lobster with steak or clams. There’s also the lavish (and, yes, expensive) Savoy Shore Dinner, which sides a giant lobster with fried shrimp and scallops and a hunk of baked snapper.
Marilyn was in a nostalgic mood and wanted her lobster “a la Newberg.” In this scandalously rich 1900s invention of New York’s famed Delmonico’s, a lobster floats in an apricot-colored sauce of heavy cream, egg yolks and a stiff shot of sherry. A few bites of her dinner left Marilyn dizzy enough to think she really heard Judy Garland singing across the dining room. But it was actually the dulcet tones of the staff’s resident tenor and weekend manager Ron Garris, who has been bursting into song in this room for two decades.
Appropriately, on my next visit, I brought along a professional singer, Cathy, who felt the kitchen hit a positively sour note with the broiled seafood casserole. Cathy’s review of her dish — stuffed shrimp, scallops, lobster and a bit of sole — was withering. “It was left under the broiler too long,” she said, poking a fork into a dried-out scallop.
Still, the rest of the meal was a showstopper. Under the attentive direction of part-time waiter Mike Maloney, Number 26 (and still a Savoy “rookie” after two years), we started with meaty, tender escargots baked in caramel-colored shells.
Unlike the disappointing seafood casserole, the Savoy’s signature au poivre sirloin, generously peppered and draped in a cloak of rich cognac sauce, performed magnificently. I shared that manly slab of meat with Cathy’s husband, Dan, who in turn snatched a couple of fried frog legs from my plate.
Though they’ve been on the Savoy’s menu forever, Dan whispered that the restaurant’s frog legs have lost some popularity over the years. The breading is a shade too heavy, but the gams themselves are juicy and flavorful. “We should have had them sautéed,” he said.
In honor of Dan’s birthday, we persuaded Garris to pull out the stops on an emotional rendition of “Danny Boy.” The song made Dan blush but brought down the house — a table of eight die-hard smokers even put down their cigs long enough to applaud.
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For an encore, we chose chocolate mousse, one of the Savoy’s many nineteenth-century dessert offerings (such as apple pie, Brandy Snaps and a crème de menthe parfait), which I vastly prefer over other restaurants’ predictable “modern” dessert trays loaded with ersatz tiramisu and chalky cheesecake.
“This is such a great place,” Cathy said, looking around the room. “We’d come here more often if it wasn’t so, well, expensive.”
But if the price one pays for dinner includes the historic setting, the stylish service, the sumptuous portions and an occasional song, it’s worth it.
