Can a hit restaurant’s kid sister survive growing pains?

A year ago, I visited a brand-new local restaurant that was clearly — in fact, almost proudly — doing everything wrong. From the décor to the menu to the presentation to the bar, all of it spelled disaster. This was amusing the first time I tried to eat there. But my second meal in the place veered from erratic to awful with such stupefying swiftness that I can only compare that night with being trapped in the front row of a really, really bad play.

That restaurant lasted five months, which isn’t much, of course, until you compare that span with the run of a bad play. And, as with lousy theater, the restaurant, upon vanishing, also disappeared from the collective consciousness. Some who dined there will recall the place’s outrageous delusions of sophistication before they’ll remember its name.

In my experience, a new restaurant (unlike a new play) needs about three months to get all the kinks worked out. If it’s still fumbling along after 90 days, it’s probably not going to improve. After three months, most new venues have steadied their initial jitters and found their confidence. Sometimes that means a menu overhaul; sometimes the staff all but completely turns over. Good dishes that don’t sell might get the ax. All of that is necessary. (And if those things don’t happen? Be very afraid.)

The new Lulu’s Asian Bistro, a modest, 65-seat restaurant by Malisa Monyakula, owner of the popular Lulu’s Thai Noodle Shop in downtown Kansas City, has just hit the three-month mark, and the journey from opening night to last week has been frightfully bumpy.

The first chef, Garrett Kasper, direct from the short-lived flop known as Kansas Town, lasted a month. “It was a personality conflict with Malisa,” one of the servers whispered to me shortly after Kasper’s departure.

It might have been somewhat more than that. Kasper is a talented and imaginative young chef, but my first two meals at Lulu’s Asian Bistro — when he was still in the kitchen — were almost inedible. One appetizer was among the most terrifying starters I’d ever encountered. How does a kitchen turn something as harmless-sounding as “tempura veggies” into a gory prop from a Tobe Hooper movie? What arrived at the table, described as chopped vegetables dipped in tempura batter and fried, amounted instead to two shiny, sticky balls of … something. These rubbery spheres of repulsiveness were nearly impossible to pull apart; after struggling for a bit, I wrote them off as a dog’s chew toys and gave up.

After Kasper left, Steve Jackson took over the kitchen. His version of that dish involves a jumble of fried carrots, onions and peppers — still stuck together but now, at least, crispy and served with a better than adequate chimichurri and dollops of punchy curry aioli.

But for every noticeable improvement, Jackson’s kitchen turns out at least one disappointment. Lulu’s Asian Bistro offered two kinds of banh mi sandwiches when it first opened: a vegetarian version with cucumbers, cilantro, carrots and pickled daikon radish, and another with pate, suckling pork and pickled vegetables tucked into a nice baguette. Both were good-sized and tasty. The current sandwich is a sad little affair: two smallish sections of toasted baguette, each enclosing an overcooked, overpriced (and overspiced) hunk of locally made Chinese pork sausage. The server had no idea which local vendor had produced the patties, and that’s good news for whoever rendered the chewy meat I was given.

Part of the blame for that may lie with my lunch order that day having sat under a heat lamp on the kitchen line. I had an impeccable view of the line — 10 feet away from my booth near the kitchen door — and I timed the difference between the plate’s completion and its arrival in front of me at seven minutes. This was my fourth visit to Lulu’s Asian Bistro, and by then, I wasn’t surprised.

As it is now, the restaurant’s menu blends longtime popular choices from the original Lulu’s with newer options, including a creative-sounding bistro list (offered every day except Monday) that features a rich vegan mushroom soup. That dish works very well. It’s a smooth and creamy concoction, thickened with tofu and coconut milk, and the ocher surface comes scattered with squares of fried tofu.

In fact, the limited bistro menu, which typically offers seven items, is more consistently satisfying than the familiar dishes on the bigger menu, with its predictable noodle choices. (The latter selection includes a serviceable pad Thai and a flavorful bowl of basil-scented drunken noodles.) There has clearly been a lot of tinkering with the bistro menu since my first visit to this new Lulu’s, and it has all been for the better. The rice-battered chicken, Monyakula’s gluten-free spin on traditional chicken lo mein, is a beautiful mix of sliced, rice-flour-battered chicken and a sleek mushroom-soy glaze. It does as advertised, taking boring old lo mein in a modern direction, and it’s tasty. There’s also a lovely slab of salmon smothered in a chai-cilantro broth.

But even here, there are problems. On one of my visits, a beef short rib braised in oyster sauce was deliciously fork-tender, with a perfectly complementary, very soothing sauce. A few weeks later, the same dish came out stringy and dry, its sauce inexcusably salty.

The dining room is cozy and not without appeal (even if it still recalls the auto-repair shop once at this address). A couple of the booths are spacious and comfortable, but I’ve also endured two that were as claustrophobic as coffins. And the stylish metal chairs used at some of the tables are exceptionally unforgiving. On one cold afternoon, I practically froze my ass off sitting near a drafty window.

The service has improved quite a bit from the early days, though a couple of the servers have all the warmth of zombies. There’s one really great staffer, a kid named Jordan who is briskly efficient and knowledgeable and has a sense of humor — a quality mostly lacking among his co-workers (give or take some managers).

A lot can happen in a restaurant over three months. And for Lulu’s Asian Bistro, the changes undertaken to improve a rough start are both obvious and welcome. But can it become as successful as its older sister, on Southwest Boulevard? That’s a question that will take a lot longer than three months to answer.