Flirt Club

I was having a languid Wednesday night dinner at Café des Amis with my fashionista friend Jennifer, who began flirting aggressively with our waiter after her second glass of Latour Pinot Noir. Then a notorious local roue — a male publicist with bedroom eyes — entered the nearly empty dining room and started coming on to Jennifer in a manner that would have made the Parkville locals blush. The next day, I got a voice message from the publicist: “Who was that saucy wench, and what can you tell me about her?”

I didn’t call him back, because that “saucy wench” has, at her tender age, a biography that she tells better than I ever could. She’s too young to know that some revelations don’t need to be repeated, a lesson I learned from my late grandmother Virginia, who was married seven times in the days when it was scandalous to have been divorced once.

Grandmother was a well-traveled lady, and later in life she looked back at her divorces with a very Parisian attitude. “Non, je ne regrette rien,” she would shrug, referring to the Edith Piaf song about regretting nothing. Virginia knew little of the song’s provocative lyrics (It is paid, swept, forgotten …), but she liked the concept that at the end of a relationship, one simply went on and started life anew. Over the years, she kept copious notes about her travels, her clothes and her meals, but she couldn’t remember the names of two of her former spouses.

“Why should I?” she said to me one night as she poured herself a glass of champagne. “I have so many more interesting things to remember.”

That’s the same attitude French-born Café des Amis owner Didier Combe has about his past romance, even though it was the impetus for opening a French restaurant in Parkville in the first place.

The handsome, tousle-haired, soccer-playing Combe gives his own little non, je ne regrette rien shrug when it comes to the issue of his former business partners. Two years ago, Combe’s lover, Megan Sparks, and chef Emmanuel Langlade ran off together to open their own chic bistro, Aixois (and make babies, too). The story has never lost its fizz in gossip-loving Kansas City, though Combe has moved on. He has a new chef in the kitchen and a new Mexican-born girlfriend in the … bar, where she sometimes works when she’s not studying for classes at nearby Park University.

Visitors to the cozy Café des Amis will reap the benefits of Combe’s latest import. Tall, dark-eyed Antonio Brocato studied the culinary arts in France, cooked in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, then somehow wound up in the tiny Café des Amis kitchen after a spin in the lavishly outfitted corporate kitchen at the Fairmont Hotel.

Half Spanish, half Italian, the soft-spoken Brocato has given a more cosmopolitan spin to the restaurant’s menu since he took over the chef’s toque from Liberty Olson (now living in Oregon) last winter. “I took the menu back to France,” Brocato says.

Longtime fans of this restaurant will see subtleties in Brocato’s menu changes rather than an overhaul. There is still an escargot appetizer, but instead of serving the snails in a bowl of hot garlic butter, Brocato gives the ugly little aphrodisiac a coating of jade-green sauce, liberally laden with butter, sherry, parsley, tarragon, basil and chives. Escargot never looked so chic or tasted so wonderful.

For a simpler hors d’oeuvre to go with a predinner apéritif, there’s a salty duet of black- and green-olive tapenade ringed with crunchy garlic toasts. There’s also a white china bowl overflowing with steamed mussels, the fragrant sherry broth at the bottom cloudy from a discreet splash of cream and coyly spiced with a hint of fresh tarragon.

[page]

Brocato trimmed the number of daily entrée specials but still offers two or three in addition to the nine menu offerings. All of which complicated Jennifer’s task of ordering dinner — it was already difficult because we’d brought along her mother, Barbara. A lifelong resident of Kansas City, she had never heard of Parkville, let alone a tapenade (“It looks like gefilte fish,” she said when it arrived) or coquilles Saint Jacques rôti au Xérès.

“It’s scallops in sherry sauce,” I said, ordering the dish for her. “And you’ll love it.”

Jennifer spent more time batting her eyelashes at the lithe, black-clad waiter, Michael (model, actor and writer), than contemplating the dinner specials, so I ordered for her, too: a veal rib chop dusted with allspice and pan-seared. She started her dinner with a lovely salad, a jumble of baby greens, portabella mushrooms, blue cheese, walnuts and roasted peppers. She plucked off the pungent cheese, explaining that she had “a thing about funky cheese.” Then she loudly blurted out, “That Didier is adorable! Is he really straight?”

“Do not bring her another glass of wine,” I ordered the waiter, who had rebellious impulses: He brought her more wine.

In short order, he arrived with the dinners, too, each one exquisitely composed. Barbara’s scallops were as plump as pillows, peeking out from a steamy amber broth. My duck breast had a dark, vibrantly spiced crust, and the slices were artfully arranged around a mound of nutmeg-scented potatoes au gratin. But Brocato’s most inspired creation was a juicy, tender veal chop swathed in a sleek fig glaze (which didn’t mask the potent allspice underneath). After dinner, he ventured out of the kitchen to ask how Jennifer liked the dish.

“It was amazing!” Jennifer raved, but she seemed melancholy after he left. “Didn’t you notice? He was not flirting with me,” she said.

The wooing continued on my next visit. My terribly sophisticated friend Karen had just taken a sip of Côtes du Rhône when the same pushy PR guy from four nights earlier showed up again and started his Charles Boyer impersonation on Karen.

“Do you live here?” I asked him as I buttered a piece of crusty Roma bread.

Karen goaded him by seeming completely uninterested in his banter. “It’s the art of subtlety,” she explained later as she daintily worked over a roasted baby lamb chop. “If you flirt, you have to appear not to be flirting. Not that I was flirting in the first place, since I have a boyfriend.”

The only thing for me to make a move on was my seared pork chop, a hunky and meaty little number draped in a rustic, thick-grained mustard-cream sauce. I was a little sheepish about making a pig of myself, having already had a passionate fling with a bowl of rich, succulent rabbit-loin stew in an addictive red-wine-and-garlic sauce.

After all that, I was satisfied enough that I only dallied with Brocato’s desserts, which included a tarte Tatin, its caramelized apples a deep, translucent shade of amber, and a profiterole filled with ice cream and slathered with a bittersweet chocolate sauce. The sorbet was an import from a local vendor but a refreshing one: peach lemonade, with the accent firmly on the lemon. It was so devilishly tart that after one bite, I could feel my lips pucker.

[page]

Alas, there was no one left in the room remotely interested in flirting with me, or vice-versa. But that’s a story I don’t feel like repeating.