Affare brings European flavor to the Crossroads

The little sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of the two-month-old Affäre announces the venue as a German restaurant. It’s a sign that has confused a number of potential walk-in patrons, who have looked at chef-owner Martin Heuser’s menu and asked, “Where’s the Wiener schnitzel? Where’s the hasenpfeffer?”

Affäre is not that kind of German restaurant. It’s nothing like, say, the late Berliner Bear in Waldo, the convivial family-owned saloon and dining room that served sausages, sauerbraten and pig knuckles for four decades, before a ridiculously bad business decision knocked the place flatter than a day-old stein of Löwenbräu. In 2005, the son of the Berliner Bear’s founders rented out the dining room to members of the National Socialist Movement — a neo-Nazi group — who took photographs of themselves in the dining room, sipping beer while wearing Nazi regalia. The negative publicity made national headlines, and before long it was bye-bye, Berliner Bear.

But well before the Bear was stripped bare, that restaurant had become an anachronism. Kansas City may have been a mecca for 19th-century German immigrants, but the heavy, fattening traditional dishes of the Deutschland had long fallen out of favor by the 1950s. If you don’t count the Rheinland Restaurant in Independence, Berliner Bear had been the last German dining room in the metro.

Which brings us back to Heuser’s Affäre, located in the building at 1911 Main formerly occupied by the cabaret-restaurant known as Bar Natasha. If the frumpy Berliner Bear is the Lotte Lenya of local restaurants, the sophisticated Affäre — pronounced affair — is the Heidi Klum of the current culinary scene. If the restaurant’s interior doesn’t dazzle you, the attractive owners — Martin and Katrin Heuser — certainly will. Central casting couldn’t have chosen a better-looking couple to work the dining room, and their two oldest children, also employed here, are equally photogenic.

And if you’re going to give a restaurant a sexy, romantic name like Affäre, platters of peasant food are out of the question. Affäre’s menu is all small plates — small and exquisitely presented plates, which arrive at the table arranged like tiny sculptures, bedecked with fresh flowers or spikes of fresh green lemongrass. The food’s elegant presentation suggests a Christopher Elbow chocolate.

Beyond the visual sumptuousness of chef Heuser’s dishes, everything tastes as wonderful as it looks. From the tawny pretzel rolls and butter served before the meal to the airy meringue Pavlova offered as a dessert, it’s all as dainty and arresting as a place setting of Meissen china.

Can it work here, though? The space that the Heusers have chosen for their intimate dining room is nearly as big as a roller rink, and the two restaurants that followed Bar Natasha into the building were spectacular failures. So far, there’s reason for hope: Affäre has been busy since it opened. And it complements the other three stylish restaurants in the neighborhood: the Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange, Michael Smith and Extra Virgin. (In fact, with the Country Club Plaza now dominated by chain operations, I’d argue that this stretch of the Crossroads is the metro’s most dynamic dining destination.)

Heuser uses a single menu for both lunch and dinner, and a perfunctory glance at the prices can be off-putting. But I’ve dined at Affäre four times, and even the highest tab I’ve paid — about a hundred bucks — has been well worth the outlay. I didn’t walk out singing the praises of every dish I sampled, but you can’t help but admire the artistic sensibility of, say, a salad that combines three kinds of fresh greens on a bed of “edible soil” (a concoction of portobello mushrooms, cocoa, almond oil and chopped almonds that looks like high-grade mulch) with asparagus, sliced radishes and flower petals. And while that’s more appealing in concept than in taste, most dishes are in a class with the chicken roulade: succulent cheese-crusted chicken-breast slices dripping with a sleek, lemony caper-butter sauce.

And remember, there’s a good reason that small plates are small: Several of the finest offerings here are outrageously rich. The perfectly seared scallop, for example, is no larger than an oversized marshmallow, but it’s draped in a creamy, head-whirling hollandaise made with the silkiest of foie gras. It takes two bites to eat, and two bites are enough to send you sinking into the booth to sleep off the rest of the evening. Similarly, the tender, divine Geschmorte bison short rib takes up little table space but is topped with a thick sliver of foie gras and is succulent enough to induce flashbacks the next day.

There’s really not much for vegetarians here, but Heuser is getting ready to add a frequent dinner special to the regular menu, a baseball-sized boiled potato dumpling (a Knödel). It’s as light as a perfect matzo ball and covered in a golden brandy cream sauce and pretty little chanterelle mushrooms. Richness doesn’t require meat, you know.

Ah, but it helps. One of the plates in highest demand here is another miniature treasure with super-sized taste: a hunk of slow-roasted elk loin, rubbed with juniper berries and splashed with a tart Bing-cherry sauce on a bed of buttery Spaetzle. This was the creation I most longed for in a more hubcaplike serving size, but I’m thinking that chef Heuser follows P.T. Barnum’s advice: “Always leave them wanting more.”

Besides, if you overindulge in the savory dishes, you’ll miss dessert. The warm apple strudel here is, unsurprisingly, extraordinary, but the chocolate mousse, infused with ginger and rosemary and served as a tiny tower with a feathery chocolate crisp, is perhaps more sensational. There’s also a fine satiny cheesecake and a bundt-style guglhupf cake, its hollow center afloat in Grand Marnier. The seasonal dessert special that I tried, the classic fragile baked meringue (named for ballerina Anna Pavlova), is an ivory sphere filled with whipped cream and fresh strawberries. It did taste like summer, which my server had promised at the beginning of the meal.

Before signing the lease for 1911, Martin Heuser nearly went for a restaurant location on 135th Street in Johnson County. “But I just kept feeling the pull to be in the Crossroads,” he told me last week. “And even with all the naysayers, I think I made the right decision.”

No restaurant opens without naysayers, but he need not second-guess himself. A culinary artist of his talent needs to be surrounded by all kinds of artists, and this neighborhood is the right setting for the cosmopolitan, distinctly European restaurant that he has created. If you’re not already having an affair with your dining companion at Affäre, your meal may spark one.