All Aflutter

I’ve heard a couple of old folk tales about dragonflies. One is that the insect has the power to sew together the lips of the wicked. A Southern legend explains that the bug’s regional name, “snake doctor,” comes from the dragonfly’s role in warning a serpent about impending danger.

I have a few words of warning myself for the stylish but potentially evanescent Dragonfly Grill, which replaced the more conventional Café Trocadero on the southwest side of “Martini Corner,” a cluster of bars at 31st Street and Gillham run by entrepreneurs Vince Rook and Chris Sefryn. At the risk of having my lips sewn together, I think the idea of the restaurant is brilliant but dangerously flawed.

Not because chef Jim Gasser’s food isn’t terrific, because it is. And not because the initial concept — lunch and dinner menus that offered only a couple of dozen “small plates” of mostly Asian-inspired dishes — wasn’t a creative, daring gamble. The trouble is, Dragonfly is aimed at distinctly fickle diners: young hipsters who would rather nibble on delicious little snacks instead of tackling traditional dinners as they sip their cocktails. But this group is a lot more discriminating when it comes to choosing top-shelf liquor than it is at ordering grazing food.

There’s another sticky little problem in that most Midwesterners don’t really like sharing a main course unless it’s pizza or fondue. And even friends of mine who are devoted to the Food Network have relatively standard perceptions about what makes a meal, and an array of tapas isn’t it. Even a dozen little plates of food isn’t dinner. It’s snacks.

But that’s only because Kansas City is slightly behind the curve, says Sefryn, who notes that restaurants serving lighter bites of Asian-fusion food are hot all over the country. “The danger for us is that a lot of people view dining out as a big ol’ plate of food,” he says. “So we’re trying to bridge the gap between being artistic and interesting and being more accessible.”

To bridge that gap, this month chef Gasser is introducing two more traditional entrées to the evening menu and several sandwiches to the lunch menu. “We have to appeal to everyone, you know,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how cool your food is if no one is coming in.”

True enough. Cutting-edge cuisine can seem awfully dull when the nearby Costco snack counter is doing better business than a sophisticated and attractive bistro. One night, a friend of mine drove to the place hoping to have a quiet dinner by himself at the bar. “I parked in front of the building and looked in the window and saw nobody,” he told me. “Not even a waiter. Just a bartender standing behind the bar. I wanted a quiet dinner but not that quiet.” So he drove off.

Too bad for him, because I thoroughly enjoyed myself on two visits to the restaurant. And although I didn’t dine alone, on both occasions our table was practically the only occupied booth in the place.

“What gives?” I asked the young server, who brought out a tray of drinks for Bob, Pat, Julie and me. “Is this place always so, um, quiet?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I mostly work across the street at the Velvet Dog.”

She did know enough to immediately explain that portions are small and that most customers order “in waves.”

I wasn’t sure what a wave was, so I just started rattling off menu items that sounded good: the steamed buns, the salmon tempura rolls, the sesame-chicken tacos. A few minutes later, with great fanfare, she brought out a black china tray with tiny dishes holding a quartet of sauces — a pale cucumber-wasabi concoction, a ginger-soy mixture, a sweet peanut sauce and a glossy dollop of Thai chili sauce — and a stack of tiny white china plates.

“These are like dollhouse plates,” Bob said. “Do you think the food is that small?”

The food is as delicate and petite as tea-party fare, but it’s big on flavor. The chicken tacos, for example, were barely 3 inches long, with pesto-splashed bits of chicken tucked into a curl of fried wonton. But they were so tasty that I could easily have polished off about ten of them in a couple of minutes. We had, however, ordered judiciously so we could sample a lot of different things, and the prices weren’t cheap.

We had settled in for a leisurely evening, and as each new plate arrived, we stopped talking to admire the pretty composition of the really stylish ones: the tiny slices of dark smoked duck, shiny with plum glaze, arranged in a fan around a spoonful of tamarind cole slaw; the extraordinary shrimp and Asian dumplings, dripping with a luscious golden tandoori lobster cream sauce.

“Everything tastes delicious,” Julie said as she dipped a hot shrimp fritter into the peanut sauce. “And so beautifully presented. ”

Pat was sipping vodka, Julie was drinking wine and I was getting woozy from the hypnotic house music playing over the speakers. “This isn’t really a restaurant,” Bob said. “It’s a bar with fancy snacks.”

Sefryn disagrees. “It’s a real restaurant that serves real food,” he says. “We want people to go to Dragonfly for dinner, then bounce around to our other three places.”

But I wasn’t about to leave after our server brought out sizzling hot robata skewers — grilled over a gas flame instead of charcoal — that represent the second word in the restaurant’s name. We tried the grilled steak, mushroom caps, pesto-splashed tofu (surprisingly tasty, even to a tofu-phobe like Julie) and the best: little meatballs made of pork and chopped cashews. They were barely larger than marbles, but that made them easy to swirl in one of the sauces and pop in our mouths.

Those meatballs were so good, in fact, that I ordered them again a few days later, at lunch with Harris. He liked the restaurant because even on a no-carb diet, he could indulge extravagantly, eating slices of pork tenderloin dusted with Chinese spices, succulent little barbecued short ribs and a large Thai beef salad. (The salad really was a big ol’ plate of food.) I helped him by eating all of the fried wontons on his salad and all of the wasabi-flavored risotto that came alongside his excellent seared ahi tuna.

Harris did a slight bit of diet damage by eating all four bites of green-tea custard served in a saké cup. (“It tastes very creamy and healthy,” he announced.) Meanwhile, I made a second effort to enjoy a dessert that sounded fabulous but missed the mark: steamed banana-toffee buns with cinnamon-caramel sauce. I think Gasser needs to rethink this one; the grayish filling looks unappetizing, and a hot banana anything is always a drag. Why not just a toffee bun?

But that was the only thing on the menu I didn’t like. Everything else I could have eaten in double or triple orders. (In one case, I did.) The prices sort of bugged me, but I have to admit that this communal dining experience was far more entertaining than sharing a pizza. Maybe I need to shake up my own perceptions about wanting a big ol’ plate of food as a main course instead of a palette of exotic flavors and textures.

And I suppose I could learn to share.