Chaz on the Plaza is still the city’s first name in hotel dining

It was inevitable, I suppose. As soon as the owner of the Raphael Hotel — the Salina, Kansas-based Lighthouse Properties — hired chef Charles d’Ablaing away from the Webster House last spring, patrons of the restaurant began assuming that Charles was the Chaz of the restaurant’s name.

It’s an easy thing to figure because d’Ablaing walks through the dining room in his starched white chef’s jacket, monogrammed with both his name and the restaurant’s, looking confident enough to front his own namesake restaurant. The three-year-old Chaz dining room, which replaced the decades-older Raphael Restaurant, was actually named for Lighthouse’s Charlie Walker. But d’Ablaing is the Chaz who counts — the public face and buzz-generating talent of this much improved dining room.

D’Ablaing’s profile rose after his culinary talents gave the Webster House — dismissed as a 0x000Aladies-who-lunch venue in its early days — some serious cachet as a first-class dining experience. With the Webster now the restaurant closest to the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the place has generated more media attention than ever this past year. Some of d’Ablaing’s contemporaries in the hospitality industry thought he was crazy to jump from a very public setting to take over a quiet, intimate space on the lower level of the Raphael Hotel.

The Raphael’s dining room has maintained a reputation for excellent continental cuisine, but time had left the place behind. At some point, a friend of mine took to calling the seriously dated space “the Regal Beagle,” after the cardboard-paneled pub on the old sitcom Three’s Company. It wasn’t that bad, but the oddly designed space was never ideal for serving food. In fact, it was originally a beauty salon in the days when 325 Ward Parkway was an apartment building. The kitchen is still ridiculously small.

But d’Ablaing is happy to be here and is preparing to launch his autumn menus, his second set since taking over the kitchen in March. The new dishes, which debut next week, fit neatly into his current repertoire, and d’Ablaing hasn’t tinkered with the dishes that proved to be immediate hits. His memorably succulent braised-beef short ribs (possibly the finest in Kansas City) and the prime strip steak remain as he originally envisioned them. So does the chicken breast stuffed with creamy Boursin cheese.

He’s determined not to lose any of this restaurant’s regulars — who tend to be well-heeled, over 40, well traveled and lovers of good wines — but he clearly means to inject some adventure into the relationship while attracting curious newcomers. He expected that his signature starters, such as braised shrimp and grits and a fine plate of fried green tomatoes (his own recipes, which he first introduced at Webster House), would be popular, and so they have been. But the Chaz crowd hasn’t fully embraced his veal cheeks yet, and he’s not giving up.

“I think diners believe they’re going to be fatty,” d’Ablaing says. The version available until last week, slow-braised until the meat was gorgeously tender and then swathed in a dark and satiny demi-glace, was outrageously delicious. But to encourage patrons to even sample the meat, d’Ablaing has begun offering the cheek on brioche buns as a sophisticated slider, with a slice of Emmentaler cheese. No one turns down a slider these days, after all.

The night I swooned over those astounding short ribs, I was dining with my friend Carol Ann, who suddenly became very selfish about sharing her bowl of maize-colored fennel-and-saffron bisque. After taking the single sip she permitted me (which included one tiny fried shrimp), I realized that this insanely rich concoction had given me all I required in a single spoonful. Any more than that would have been a venial sin.

Sin made Carol Ann toy with the idea of ordering d’Ablaing’s vaguely Asian preparation of duck breast (with smoked cherries, mango mignonette and bamboo rice), but it’s going off the fall menu, so she stuck with the dish that has become, over the last two decades, the best-known menu item here: lamb chops. “You can’t ever take lamb off the menu,” d’Ablaing says. “It’s one of our best-selling dishes and something that this restaurant has built a reputation on.”

[page]

The lamb chops at the Raphael have always been divine, but d’Ablaing has bettered a classic by using luscious American meat. His kitchen prepares the chops exquisitely and serves them with a creamy basil spaetzle gratin and braised turnips. They’re as costly as any hotel restaurant’s signature dish but, in this case, more than worth the money.

There’s not a lot for vegetarians on the dinner menu at Chaz other than a tasty, uncomplicated and summery pasta with crushed tomatoes, fresh basil, roasted peppers, olive oil and parmigiano-reggiano. D’Ablaing says he’ll make dishes to order, but his fall menu could use a meatless entrée as dazzling as the flesh that’s offered. (The rich macaroni and cheese that’s listed among the side dishes, prepared with aged Henning’s cheddar and liberally sprinkled with truffle oil, can be doubled as a main course. It was so gorgeous that I intend to go back and do just that.)

D’Ablaing recently hired a bright young sous chef, Kelly Conwell from Concordia, Kansas, and has turned the hotel’s dessert program over to her, but not before finally eliminating from the menu the Raphael’s most-ordered dessert: chocolate mousse. I always found its popularity inexplicable because it was far from fabulous, and d’Ablaing must have agreed. “People don’t even really ask about it anymore,” he says.

One of Conwell’s new desserts is a tower of fall flavors: a slab of bourbon pound cake placed on a bottom layer of brown-butter-and-cinnamon apples and topped with a light timbale of sweet-potato flan. It’s a lovely dessert, but I was more passionate about her maple-scented crème brûlée, sprinkled with port-soaked cranberries and crunchy toasted hazelnuts.

I returned a few days later for breakfast, joined by Jenny, who was intrigued by d’Ablaing’s spin on poached eggs. The eggs are poached in red wine that seeps discreetly into the surface and turns them a vivid purple. While the wine has no intoxicating effect, it adds a subtle tartness to the eggs, accentuated by a warm parmesan potato cake and strips of crisp bacon. All of that arrives under a soothing coat of lemony hollandaise. The sauce defeats the wine’s intended tang, but it’s still a dish to savor and look forward to ordering again. The excellent eggs Benedict further prove that most things in life can be improved with a decadent sauce.

The Chaz menu describes its French toast as being prepared with Calvados apple brandy, but I tasted no hint of it. “We do a lot of business breakfasts here,” d’Ablaing says, “so it couldn’t be too potent.” The fall menu trades fancy for homespun, replacing the Calvados with good American molasses.

The service at Chaz is impeccable, but this restaurant, in all of its incarnations over the years, has always taken excellent care of its guests. Our server for that morning’s meal was a young man who told us that he would soon move to Chicago to follow his dream of becoming an actor. That seemed only fitting given the theatricality that’s elemental to fine dining.

Chaz is also among the few dining spots left in this city with live entertainment and dancing. For patrons whose dream is dining out where service and venue add up to something like a performance, the Raphael is a prime destination that meets its own high standards. There’s just a new Chaz in the building.