Ego Trip

Fritz Co. Grille operates in three locations — Overland Park, Lee’s Summit and Topeka (a Wichita location shut down last month) — which makes it a minichain, I guess. One with an interesting motto: “We put our ego in the food, not in our prices.”

Call me crazy, but I’m not sure what it means to put ego in food. If the company’s Lawrence-based owner, Tom Allen, means that he expresses himself through his culinary creations, it’s worth perusing the menu to develop an appreciation of his eccentric sensibilities. Sure, the prices are extremely reasonable — who knew that it was ego and not greed that makes some restaurateurs charge a lot more for a grilled rib eye than Allen does?

From outside its Overland Park location, the restaurant looks highfalutin in a J. Gilbert’s kind of way. But J. Gilbert’s really is an upscale steakhouse, whereas Fritz Co. is going after a demographic that wants a more multicultural approach — barbecued ribs, fettuccine Alfredo, Philly steak sandwiches and Sicilian meatloaf.

I’m not here to psychoanalyze the place, though the dining room’s layout is seriously discombobulating. I can’t recall eating in a room designed — thanks to a series of booths that are almost like cubicles — so that diners rarely see other diners. If I were planning to arrange an illicit affair, Fritz Co. Grille would be my assignation destination. The sense of isolation didn’t necessarily bother me, but a couple of my dining companions found the seclusion uncomfortable.

On my first visit, with Bob and Richard and Lisa, I felt as if we were trapped in an episode of some Twilight Zone-meets-Seinfeld TV show. A haughty hostess — beautiful but loaded with ego in all the wrong ways — escorted us through a seemingly half-empty restaurant to a concealed table at the rear of the building. We never saw her again. Our fates were then in the hands of a pleasant server, Natlie, who seemed disoriented when our pushy little quartet started asking questions about the menu.

“Tell me about the espresso-crusted New York strip,” I said. “Is it rubbed in ground espresso before it’s grilled?”

First she looked blank. Then she fired back, “It’s a seasoning. The meat is seasoned before it goes on the grill.”

“So I assume that coffee is part of the seasoning?”

“That steak has absolutely nothing to do with coffee.”

I shrugged and turned back to the menu. Silly me, what was I thinking?

As a starter, we decided to share the fried portabella fingers (one of six deep-fried options on the appetizer menu) because we couldn’t agree on anything else. Lisa doesn’t like seafood, which eliminated the shrimp, the calamari and the pan-seared tuna. And no one wanted wings or fried pepper-jack-cheese “stix.”

The meaty mushroom slices were greasy and covered with a chewy skin of melted mozzarella; the fat fingers’ crunchy coating had a dark color, revealing that the kitchen needed to change the fryer oil.

It was only after we finished our tepid, boring salads that we realized Fritz Co. Grille just gives the illusion of being an upscale steak joint. Its dining room is pretty, with high ceilings, polished wood and deep-blue and yellow walls. But, with its bouncy soundtrack of Top 40 oldies, this restaurant has a lot more in common with Applebee’s than it does with the Capital Grille. And not just because it serves a peanut butter burger and fried cheese sticks.

I knew we were in trouble when Bob asked Natlie if he could have béarnaise sauce with his 8-ounce, hand-carved filet. Again the blank look. “I’ll have to ask the kitchen if we can do that,” she said.

When she left, I told Bob that requesting béarnaise at a place like this would be like asking for crêpes suzette at a Waffle House. Natlie returned and informed us, with some authority, that “no one in the kitchen has ever heard of ber-nay sauce.” They had, however, heard of creamy blue-cheese sauce, because it came with the supposedly coffee-free espresso-crusted strip. So Bob asked for that.

“It tastes like salad dressing,” Bob griped after it arrived. “But the filet’s decent. Not great. Decent.”

I’d been scandalized when Lisa ordered her brown-sugar-drizzled Blue Grass Kansas City strip to be cooked well-done. She had some theory that the meat would be “safe” to eat only if it had been cooked to death. Yes, she’s one of those. I dreaded what might come out of the kitchen, but, even well-done, it was a nice cut of beef and pretty tasty. Richard had toyed with the idea of ordering pecan-encrusted trout draped with sweet praline sauce until I told him that a friend had sent it back, insisting that it was “candy-coated fish.” He chose the peanut-crusted halibut, which had some fire to it but had been sautéed in a little too much olive oil.

I, naturally, got the flop du jour. “Baja fish tacos” turned out to be battered fried fish rolled in a soft tortilla with mounds of gloppy, mushy slaw that made eating it by hand impossible. I finally gave up and scraped all that sticky cabbage off the damn thing.

Our night did have a high point, though: a fabulous hot cinnamon-crumble apple crisp. Unfortunately, we couldn’t say the same for Lisa’s chocolate cobbler. “It tastes like it’s nothing but Oreo crumbs,” she said. “I thought it would be like a cake.”

Yeah, well, I thought Fritz Co. Grille would be like a steakhouse.

“The Bristol has nothing to worry about,” said my friend Teena on another visit that also included David and Carol. That night, we shared an undistinguished calamari appetizer before Teena’s sautéed tilapia arrived smothered in a thick, spicy red-pepper sauce. She finally scraped the sauce to the side. “The kitchen needs to understand that less is more.”

David, however, gave thumbs up to a generous bowl of pasta tossed in a Cajun-spiced cream sauce with chicken, crawfish and andouille sausage. “I got the best dish of the night,” he bragged.

But Carol was also thrilled with her unadorned slab of salmon grilled with garlic and dill. And I’d gone ahead and ordered the mysterious espresso-crusted strip. The recipe must be some guarded secret, because even one of the managers told me that he wasn’t quite sure what was in the seasoning mixture. “But I think — I’m not sure — there’s some kind of coffee in it.” Whatever. I liked it. The steak had been delicately blackened, seasoned with great subtlety and perfectly grilled. But the slightly chewy strip wasn’t the finest I’d ever tasted.

Once again, the best part of the meal was the finale: a superb, moist bread pudding served white-hot in a little black skillet, drenched in a bubbly, buttery caramel sauce. We almost battled over the last luscious bite.

If Tom Allen had been trying to bring out our own aggressive egos, it worked. For a lot less than we would have paid a professional.