Blanc opens a sequel, with cheese

It doesn’t seem possible that anyone in Kansas City wouldn’t know about Blanc Burgers + Bottles, the enormously popular fancy-burger concept created by the team of Ernesto Peralta, Jenifer Price, chef Josh Eans and bartender David McMullin. But when the quartet decided to expand its mini empire to the eastern suburb of Lee’s Summit — in addition to the Blanc location on the Country Club Plaza, there’s a second outpost in Leawood — Peralta decided that “no one there would know what Blanc Burgers + Bottles was.” So, he says, “We went back to the drawing board.”

The result was something different and less expensive but still full-service: B:2 Burger Boutique. Think of it as Blanc’s country cousin: not as sophisticated as the original Blanc (though Jenifer Price’s stylishly stark, cool interior here recalls her designs for the other restaurants), with a lower price point. It’s cheaper in part because the burgers are smaller. All but one of the B:2 beef burgers are made of 6-ounce beef patties, whereas Blanc uses 6-ounce patties for lunch and steps up to 8 ounces for dinner. Also: A beer menu is fitted only with American craft beers (leaving behind Blanc’s United Nations-ready approach to suds).

It’s a small-town version of Blanc, done up in white and shades of royal blue, with a dozen specialty sandwiches (including a black-bean burger, a beer-brat burger and a beer-battered cod sandwich). All of them are different from the snazzier choices on the Blanc menu.

“We didn’t want to be competing with ourselves,” Peralta says. “We wanted to complement ourselves.”

In the five months since B:2 opened in the upscale Summit Fair shopping center in Lee’s Summit, Peralta and his partners have realized that sticking to uncomplicated comfort food was the right move for this suburb. Lee’s Summit diners didn’t care for the restaurant’s first attempt at a vegetarian option, for example, so the eggplant burger went away, replaced by the much more popular black-bean patty.

“Our B:2 customers don’t really want fancy burgers,” Peralta says. “We added a turkey burger that’s selling really well. And our top-selling sandwiches are our B:mac and the Summit burger.”

The B:mac is a spin on a certain iconic double-­decker. That sandwich was first known as the Big Boy, at the old Bob’s Big Boy restaurants, and then was seared into the American subconscious by copycat McDonald’s, which introduced its Big Mac in 1968. The Summit burger is a little more out-there by comfort-food standards: a grilled patty topped with blue cheese, pickled red onion, arugula and horseradish mayonnaise. Don’t expect McDonald’s to steal this one.

I did love the faux Big Mac, though. It’s a stack of two 4-ounce patties on a Farm to Market sesame-seed roll (which fell apart in my hands after the first bite) under a house-made “secret sauce” (it tasted a lot like Thousand Island dressing to me) and a slice of punchy white Cheddar, pickles and red onion. Would I order it again? You bet.

Peralta is especially proud of the crispy chicken wings on the limited starter list. (The appetizers number only three, and one of them is chili.) I think they need to be crispier, given their generous blanket of “wing sauce” that’s slightly vinegary under its cayenne spice. B:2’s executive chef is longtime Blanc staffer Andy Ward, who has been with Peralta’s creative team since the first Blanc opened in Westport. He’s a real talent, but he can go wild with the salt shaker. Yes, I know that lots of Kansas City diners prefer a saline level in their food that’s roughly equivalent to that of the Dead Sea, but I’m not one of them. These wings were as salty as they were spicy. And the truffle fries were so salty that I finally gave up trying to eat them.

[page]

But when Ward is on the mark, he puts out some seriously satisfying sandwiches. The French onion burger — a slightly sexier version of the recipe found on the can of Campbell’s French Onion Soup — was delicious, served on a wonderful potato bun and daubed with whole-grain mustard. I would have liked it better with a real Gallic cheese — a nutty Grùyere or a creamy Brie — instead of bland Swiss, but that’s not the style that Peralta, chef Josh Eans and company are going for in Lee’s Summit.

“We’re very sensitive to the economic times and the demographics of this area,” Peralta told me later. “We aren’t going for fancy. We’re going for comfort.”

I’m not sure I would use that word to describe Jenifer Price’s not-very-warm interior, which is vaguely reminiscent of the cartoon home of George and Jane Jetson. On my first visit to this restaurant with Carol Ann and Martha, the décor wasn’t as cold as the air conditioning, which felt meat-locker frosty. We ate outside instead. And I’m glad we did because B:2 has one of the most pleasant patios in Lee’s Summit, with an almost gardenlike quality.

We also had a charming, engaging waiter who added a great deal of joie de vivre to the meal (unlike the impersonal dolt I had on my second visit, when I dined alone and had all my food, including the appetizer, served at once). Martha is never as happy as she is when there’s an equal-opportunity waiter flirting with everyone at the table. It’s not very discriminating, of course, but it’s flattering.

Martha and Carol Ann liked the fried pickles, though the slices of fermented cucumber weren’t sour, sweet or garlicky. They could have been fried squash for all we knew. I did enjoy Andy Ward’s take on the classic patty melt, but once again the Swiss cheese — it’s featured on three of the 12 sandwiches here, and it’s not even baby Swiss! — sort of put my nose out of joint.

“You could have requested a different cheese,” Carol Ann told me. And she was right. Why hadn’t I? Carol Ann thought that the black-bean burger was terrific and insisted that I taste it. I’ve had some bad luck with black-bean burgers before (typically too crumbly, too boring, too beany), but B:2’s is terrific: not as spicy as the lentil creation served at Blanc but with a subtle, sexy kick.

Martha ate her French onion burger without the bun. “Those carbohydrates are very fattening,” she said, watching me devour the grilled marble rye around my patty melt.

I felt vindicated a bit later when Martha ate most of the dessert. At Blanc, the only real finale on the menu is a milkshake, which doesn’t count as dessert in my book. Looking to expand this restaurant’s repertoire, Peralta has started purchasing folded apple pies from pastry chef Erin Brown, the dessert doyenne of the Dolce Baking Company in Prairie Village. The kitchen fries the apple pie until crisp and rolls it in cinnamon-sugar until thickly crusted in a sweet-savory armor. It’s a glam variation on the old McDonald’s fried apple pie (not fried at Mickey D’s anymore but baked) and really very good with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. I think the pastry could use more apples, but I got just a couple of bites before Martha and Carol Ann took greedy possession.

[page]

“They need to open one downtown,” Carol Ann said of B:2 on the drive back to midtown from Lee’s Summit. “Or Brookside!”

“But those are the neighborhoods that frequent Blanc,” I reminded her. And anyway, if Peralta’s people are going for the small-town demographic, they should think about Olathe or Topeka. Then again, every corner of the metro needs what Lee’s Summit is getting now: a good burger and a deep-fried pie.