Gringo’s Paradise

For most Americans under the age of thirty, it doesn’t seem possible that there was ever a world (let alone a Kansas City suburb) without a Taco Bell, a Taco Via or a neighborhood Mexican joint serving vinyl baskets of corn chips and little plastic saucers of ersatz “taco sauce.” I’m over thirty and can barely remember a time when there wasn’t a taco salad on a menu or a spice-free burrito at the no-frills Mexican restaurants my parents infrequently visited. My mom, a Midwesterner to the core, viewed all Mexican food with suspicion, always worried that it would be “too spicy.” It wasn’t.

“If there were Mexican restaurants around Kansas City in the 1940s and ’50s, I don’t remember them,” says my friend Shifra Stein, a former restaurant reviewer for The Kansas City Star, echoing a comment I’ve heard from other friends who came of age before the explosion of Mexican restaurants that rippled across the Midwest in the 1970s. “I never saw a tamale,” says my retired friend Richard Phelps, “until I moved out on my own. Even if there had been lots of Mexican restaurants in Kansas City — and I don’t think there were — my parents, who had very basic tastes, wouldn’t have taken us to one. Nor to a Chinese restaurant. If we went out to eat in the 1960s, we went to a fried chicken house or to a drive-in for hamburgers. And that was a big thing.”

So while Bob and I stood in Dos Reales‘ tiny lobby, waiting in line for a table at the five-month-old Overland Park restaurant, I couldn’t help but contemplate how the world had changed. It was only 6 p.m. and the place was packed. “In just a few decades,” I told him, “Mexican food has become more popular than chicken or hamburgers.”

And just as bland. The National Restaurant Association reported last year that the demand for tacos, burritos and the like had moved Mexican food out of the specialized “ethnic food” category and into the mainstream. Okay, so maybe no one (myself included) wants to sample that ancient Oaxacan delicacy called chapulines — toasted grasshoppers — along with a frozen margarita. But when did a crock of refried beans with melted cheese, a concoction as colorless and flavorless as sludge, become so celebrated?

Bean dip, nachos and combination plates are what customers want. And by mixing familiar Americanized dishes with a few unexpected offerings — such as an excellent, piquant green sauce — Alvero Quezada has created a mini-empire that includes Sol Azteca on Southwest Boulevard, the Dos Reales on 75th Street and another Dos Reales that opened last week at Quivira and Shawnee Mission Parkway. (Two Illinois restaurants also boast the Dos Reales name: Quezada’s first eatery in Champaign and one in Rockford.)

The Dos Reales on 75th Street is a glam Mexican restaurant by Kansas City standards, with tile floors and walls the color of tropical fruits. On Friday nights, the Doug Nelson Duo plays live renditions of “La Bamba,” “Feliz Navidad” and rock hits from the 1950s and ’60s. “Oh, look!” a friend of mine squealed when the requisite appetizers arrived. “You know it’s upscale when the chips come in wicker baskets.”

Dos Reales’ spiral-bound menu is elaborate — and has color photographs, like a Waffle House — but most of the dishes are variations on tried-and-true Mexican-American standards. That’s one reason it’s so crowded. The food is comfortably familiar and contains no hint of the distinctive spices Mexican cooks use to counter the heat of a really hot chile pepper: cloves, bay leaf, European oregano, thyme.

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The plebian tamale gets a fashion makeover here (it is, after all, Johnson County), looking more rich and decadent than it tastes. But ultimately it’s another thin layer of masa wrapped around shredded pork and served with a mild red chile sauce, chunks of beef and a splash of sour cream.

I bypassed the 25 combination dinners (which are alluringly inexpensive) and focused on the dinner specials, which aren’t extraordinary unless your eyes become riveted — as mine do — to anything with the word “secret” in it. But whatever “secret recipe” the Dos Reales cooks use to prepare their grilled pork tips for the Carnitas Dinner, the result isn’t magical. Fat, slightly crispy chunks of marinated pork seem lively enough when they’re doused with a cilantro-heavy pico de gallo, but on its own, the pork is dry. A beef version, Chile Colorado, was much better: the meat softer, the sauce a little spicier.

I watched in amazement as my tiny friend Carol tackled a plate of beef enchiladas — nearly bigger than she was — piled with a mound of shredded lettuce and sour cream. And she looked on admiringly when my fajitas arrived on a sizzling black metal platter.

At Dos Reales, a fajita isn’t merely a jumble of grilled meat, chopped onion and strips of red and green pepper. Instead, it’s a showy display of thickly cut meat — a carnivore’s fantasy. The Texanas combination has succulent slices of marinated beef, juicy chunks of chicken breast and pink curls of grilled shrimp all heaped together with peppers and tomato, ready to be wrapped in a tortilla with spoonfuls of cold sour cream, creamy guacamole and, ¡dios mio!, some joltingly peppery pico to liven it all up.

Not many Mexican joints serve six cuts of grilled steak, but Dos Reales has T-bones, ribeyes and a pounded steak cooked Milanese-style in egg batter and bread crumbs. On one visit I wolfed down a juicy T-bone that had simmered with peppers and onions — though there wasn’t a hint of anything distinctive other than those peppers and onions. I longed for the more flavorful fajita combination. My friend Bob felt the same way about his hefty Burrito Bravo, which he’d ordered stuffed with both chicken and sliced steak. But even that sounded good on another visit, when he sullenly nibbled his way through the festive-sounding La Favorita (which turned out to be a chicken burrito and a chicken enchilada), griping that he “wished he had ordered the Burrito Bravo again.” La Favorita was no favorite of his.

I preferred the Burrito Mexicano, a flour tortilla wrapped around bits of savory pork and sweet peppers, drenched in cheese sauce. Still, afterward I felt the same as I feel after every visit to a Mexican restaurant: as stuffed as that burrito, hating myself for overindulging in those chips, that damn guacamole, the refried beans.

That’s why I was tempted only once by dessert, impulsively ordering both a flan and a sopapilla to share with two friends who were boxing up their leftovers. But the tiny dollop of fluffy egg custard, lightly drenched in a caramel sauce, was overwhelmed by a clump of phony-tasting whipped cream (with a neon-red maraschino cherry, no less). And the sopapilla was less a pillow of deep-fried pastry than a crusty, plate-sized crêpe generously dusted with cinnamon and splashed with honey. It too had an irrelevant mound of that shiny whipped cream and a cherry.

Service at Dos Reales is snappy and attentive, with mustachioed men running out from the kitchen, balancing as many as six hot plates on their oven mitts. The food reflects the spirit of this inexpensive, good-natured and brightly colored place: hot but not spicy; fast but not impersonal; and as comfortably American as Antonio Banderas in Spy Kids.