Fowl Ball
For the birds: No American holiday focuses on food as much as Thanksgiving, the annual tribute to the nation’s first public banquet. In romanticized paintings and children’s books, Puritan settlers and native Americans sit together in a friendly fashion, sharing the bounty of a land they’d soon fight over. So much for historical interpretation. But unfortunately, the also-romanticized traditional — and boring — Thanksgiving menu of roasted turkey, baked dressing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie seems to change little over the decades.
The staple of most Thanksgiving gatherings, the now-beloved turkey, was called “Indian chicken” after it was “discovered by Cortes and his men in Mexico in 1520,” Jean-Louis Flanderin writes in Food: A Culinary History. Once Europeans got a taste of turkey, the big, fat, and tender bird quickly replaced other, less tasty fowl — such as stork, heron, swan, and peacock — on European tables.
Today it’s a rare restaurant that has stork or swan on the menu. But on Thanksgiving Day, even steakhouses tend to change their feathers. For example, the Colony Steakhouse and Lobster Pot (8821 State Line) will serve a Thanksgiving buffet, without steak or seafood but with plenty of the traditional stuff, from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
If you want to eat your bird with a bird’s eye view, there’s Skies, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt Regency Hotel (2345 McGee). And if you haven’t made plans until the very last second and you’d like to gamble on a chance that there’s still a table, the buffets will be open at Harrah’s, Argosy, and Station casinos.
Most of the area’s cafeterias will be open on Thanksgiving Day too. At Furr’s Family Dining locations you can get take-home holiday packages that include roasted turkey, green beans, cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, and pumpkin pie. But if you’d like to sample some of this Texas-based chain’s weirder dishes — such as that mysterious square of classic postwar “gelatin salad” — you’ll have to snap up a tray and eat in. On a recent visit to the Furr’s at 9421 Metcalf (where the interior is so cold and antiseptic it could pass for a hospital lobby) in Overland Park, a friend dared me to taste the quivering, foamy cube of green Jell-O and cottage cheese. I did, hesitantly, and discovered it’s made with a colorless chopped fruit that I suspected was pineapple, but only after ruling out celery, apple, and carrots. The “salad” tasted sweet, but without any identifying natural flavor. Later, when I paid the bill, I asked the silver-haired cashier if the concoction was made with pineapple or something less exotic.
“It’s supposed to be pineapple,” she said, winking at me. “When they make it right, it tastes pretty good. But sometimes they don’t make it the right way.”
Get out that Betty Crocker Cookbook, I say.
For something completely different on Thanksgiving Day, there’s always a stack of hot flapjacks: The International House of Pancakes (8701 W. 63rd Street, Merriam) stays open until 1 p.m.
And for those who prefer kung pao chicken or sweet and sour chicken to “Indian chicken,” the Fire Wok Restaurant (5818 Johnson Drive, Mission) serves Chinese fare until 2 p.m. But there’s no pumpkin pie for dessert.
