All the good things about 39th Street’s Blue Koi survive the expansion to Leawood

When a beloved Kansas City, Missouri, restaurant tries to expand its customer base by opening a location on the Kansas side, there’s always the danger that something will be lost in translation. For every success story — Hereford House, the Bristol, Andre’s Confiserie Suisse — I can think of just as many failures, including Princess Gardens, Hannah Bistro, Michael Forbes Grill, Le Mediterranee and the Golden Ox. Not everyone agrees with me, but as far as I’m concerned, the midtown Room 39 remains warm and friendly, whereas the sleek Leawood branch is as uptight and stuffy as a George Will lecture.

I have noticed, however, that the customers flocking to the soothingly cool dining room at Leawood’s year-old Blue Koi look a lot like the crowd dining in the original restaurant at 1803 West 39th Street — a well-balanced demographic study. I’ve seen taut-faced blond matrons with shiny Jaguars in the parking lot, scruffy college kids in torn blue jeans and sunburned young parents with babies.

The suburban version of the restaurant also looks exactly the same as the original. When the Chang family, of the Genghis Khan Mongolian Barbecue empire, took over the former Veco’s Italian Restaurant in 2001, they retained the dark-umber Mediterranean floor tiles but painted the long, narrow storefront in shades of turquoise, saffron and Mandarin red. The place offered such a different spin on Asian cuisine — there’s no General Tso’s chicken on this menu — that it was an immediate hit. Midtown had never seen a noodle-and-dumpling joint like this before. The seductive, low-key ambience, moderate prices and sensual dishes provided a combination as intoxicating as a booze-spiked glass of bubble tea. Even friends of mine who didn’t like Chinese restaurants fell in love with Blue Koi.

By creating a larger but nearly identical copy of the midtown dining room, the Changs have effectively taken everything that was wonderful about the original location and placed it out south. That includes young, attractive and well-trained servers.

My friend Diane thinks the Leawood version of the restaurant is a lot noisier, but that’s because the ceilings are higher and there was a baby screaming its tiny head off at a nearby table when we were there. I’m usually annoyed by the pitch of a crying baby, but I preferred the squalling infant to some of the Top 40 music playing over the speakers.

I had called ahead to find out the best time to arrive on a Friday evening. “If you can get here before 6:30, you can usually beat the crowd,” said the young woman on the phone. I followed her advice, and Diane, Sherry and I were seated before every table in the joint was taken.

“You order for me,” Diane said. “I trust your judgment.”

I hate that kind of responsibility, but Diane put her fate in my hands. Sherry wasn’t so trusting, but she happily shared the sexy starters I’d requested: puffs of crispy flash-fried tofu sided with the restaurant’s sweet-hot chili-and-cilantro Awesome Sauce; pan-fried dumplings stuffed with chopped shrimp; plump, meat-filled wontons floating in a slightly more fiery concoction of chili paste, soy and fresh herbs.

The Blue Koi menu notes that in China, dumplings are eaten as meals. Our group could have ordered one more plate of dumplings and been perfectly satisfied, but I’d been itching for a plate of Ants on a Tree. One of the signature dishes here, it’s a jumble of shiny, transparent bean noodles swirled with bits of chopped carrots, crunchy sautéed cabbage and minced pork. “It’s all about texture, isn’t it?” Diane said as she took note of the soft and threadlike noodles, the crisp cabbage and the sweet pork. We also noticed the texture of Blue Koi’s roast duck, which isn’t served with a crackly skin but rather in neat, succulent slices fanned out over thick noodles or rice. Sherry loved it, and so did I — it was a much more dazzling dish than the shade-dry ginger-basil chicken, which I thought needed a lot more fresh basil.

When it came time for dessert, the very thought of fried “cheesecake wontons” disturbed me for some reason. But the idea intrigued Diane and Sherry, who raved about the amber puddle of cranberry and mango purée at the bottom of the dish, even though they were unimpressed by the unrecognizable marble-sized ball of “cheesecake” tucked into a crispy fried wonton. After much urging, I took a bite and thought it tasted more like crab rangoon than a dessert. In fact, I would have preferred crab rangoon.

I returned several nights later with Bob — a Blue Koi devotee — and New Yorkers Becky and David, who had never been to either location. “It’s stylish and casual and unpretentious,” Becky said. “The music’s too loud, though.”

“You won’t notice it when the dining room gets full,” I reassured her. We passed around the China Moon, a fried flat circle of flaky pastry stuffed with minced shrimp and served with a syrupy, sticky plum sauce. Becky had never tasted the lettuce wraps, so she carefully folded a crisp leaf of cold iceberg around a spoonful of minced chicken, shiitake mushrooms and peanuts. The dish is a favorite of mine and — I can’t believe I’m saying this — it wasn’t half-bad dipped in the plum sauce, so sugary that it tasted like a melted grape Tootsie pop.

The menu had a full-color insert promoting a new dish: tilapia (or shrimp, chicken or tofu) sautéed in a shiny, miso-based glaze. Bob and David went with the chicken and shrimp, respectively. I love miso and tasted both, but the sweet, sesame-studded glaze tasted a lot closer to old-fashioned sweet-and-sour sauce than mellow fermented soybean paste to me.

Blue Koi makes its spiciest dish — the Fire Bird — with duck, chicken or tofu, each version slathered with a punchy, addictive chili-scallion paste. Our server had warned spice-loving Becky that, in his opinion, the dish didn’t pack much heat. (He added that some patrons say it’s a tongue burner.) I took a bite myself and was pleasantly surprised — it’s in a very nice, middle-Fahrenheit range.

It wasn’t as lovely as my favorite Blue Koi meal: slices of slow-roasted, gorgeously marinated pot roast on a pile of ribbon-shaped noodles. The meal was just as soothing and satisfying on the Kansas side as on 39th Street.

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