His Way

Now that Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. are dead, the lingering image of these ring-a-ding, hard-drinking, chain-smoking Rat Packers has become a kind of metaphor for everything that was dangerously cool in Hollywood in the 1950s and ’60s. Actress Shirley MacLaine, the unofficial female member of the group, says that in reality, they didn’t call themselves the Rat Pack at all but rather “The Clan.”

“The Rat Pack … was a previous group that revolved around Bogie, much earlier,” MacLaine wrote in 1991. “The Clan came out of the film we made together called Some Came Running. Life with Clan members was a theatrical party, where sleep and taking care of one’s self was secondary to FUN.”

Sinatra owned a financial stake in Las Vegas casino The Sands, so its Copa Room became the unofficial headquarters for Old Blue Eyes and his pals. But it wasn’t always that much fun. “If a room-service waiter brought him a hamburger that was too well-done,” wrote Sinatra biographer Kitty Kelly in His Way, “there was a good chance that it would be thrown against the wall, and the chef fired.”

The 44-year-old Sands was demolished in 1996. But thanks to a revival of Rat Pack interest — a TV movie, a documentary series, the remake of Ocean’s Eleven — the Copa Room name still has enough cachet that two young entrepreneurs adopted it for their Italian restaurant and nightclub in midtown Kansas City, Missouri.

Chuck Mussorici and Carlo Cammisano, who initially gutted the badly aging quasi-colonial brick building at 3421 Broadway and turned it into the stylish but ill-fated nightclub Aqua, have given the space an even more dramatic rehab to create their own incarnation of The Copa Room.

Rather than being Vegas brassy, the mood is as muted as a Sinatra ballad, thanks to the wisdom of interior designer Tina Blanke, who has erased any glimmer of the shimmery blue shades she used for Aqua. That club took a short plunge as a straight lounge before drowning as a gay bar. Mussorici and Cammisano are on much firmer ground with the Copa concept, which combines a limited but tasteful menu of traditional Italian-American dishes with a dimly lighted martini bar and a sound system that doesn’t play a tune recorded after 1969. Sinatra is the primary musical influence here, but on two visits I also enjoyed vintage Mel Torme, Peggy Lee, Dean Martin, Nancy Wilson, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr. (belting out “That Old Black Magic”).

The music isn’t the only retro touch here. There are also big, comfortable privacy booths in one corner of the L-shaped dining room. “The company that manufactured these for us said they hadn’t made anything like them since the early Vegas days,” Mussorici says. And then there’s my favorite throwback: surprisingly cheap prices.

But the Copa Room isn’t stingy when it comes to the size of the portions or the quality of the ingredients. On my first visit, with Bob and Jennifer, we barely made a dent in the heap of crispy fried calamari, fired up with pepperocinis and tongue-tingling red peppers. My dinner, a slab of Nonni’s baked lasagna, was so tall and thick with ricotta that I managed to eat only half of it before nearly passing out from exhaustion. Jen had the same problem with her flaky fillet of sautéed basa (a Vietnamese-raised catfish); she took most of it home with her. Bob, a longtime Rat Pack fan, insisted on the Frank, Dean and Sammy Combo: a hunk of lasagna, a pile of cheesy penne Alfredo and a half portion of chicken spiedini. He was still happily nibbling on the leftovers 3 days later — and blabbing about it to everyone he knew. “It’s such a nice little place,” he said, “and hardly anyone has heard about it yet.”

Well, it’s only 3 months old, and the location has housed a dozen or more doomed restaurants over the past 30 years, including a Cajun joint that nearly burned to the ground.

“I remember this place being called The Cock & Bull in the 1960s,” said my caustic and overly critical chum Ned when I brought him to dinner with our friend Jann (a lovely lady with a tendency to be high-maintenance in restaurant settings). Ned had not been a fan of Aqua, but he and Jann were volubly impressed by the new dining room, done in warm shades of bronze, gold, mahogany and burnt umber.

“It’s very sleek without being snobby at all,” Ned said, noting the elegant upholstery and the fact that the tables were uncloaked but the napkins were linen. The bartender doubled as the waiter that night, which made for some harried and erratic service, but the food came out of the kitchen promptly enough and pleasantly hot.

The kitchen is overseen by Cammisano’s mother, Kathy Fiorello. That may be why most of the dishes taste like they’ve been prepared in some Sicilian mamma’s cucina. That was especially true of one appetizer, pork-and-beef meatballs beautifully seasoned and pan-fried in olive oil until they were slightly crunchy, served with a hearty sugo. I was less impressed with the stuffed artichoke, which was generously doused with butter and garlic — and loaded with so many sodden bread crumbs that trying to eat the gooey leaves was more exercise than pleasure. Ned liked it, bread crumbs and all. “It was fun and sloppy,” he said, “although the artichoke leaves weren’t very meaty.”

The Copa Room’s dinners include a house salad and a basket of warm, yeasty rolls. Jann drove our server crazy with innumerable demands for cold butter (“I have a thing about melting butter”), but he was more cheerful about her whining than I was. But as she nibbled on a salad dressed with a tart balsamic vinaigrette, Jann confessed that she liked the Copa Room. “It reminds me of the 500 Club in Atlantic City when I was a girl.”

“What year was that?” Ned asked, pouring himself a glass of Folonari Pinot Grigio and winking. “The 1950s?”

Jann quickly changed the subject. She brightened up considerably when dinner arrived. She had ordered the marinated chicken breast basted with amogio — but only after we explained to her that amogio was a simple blend of extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and herbs and not some creamy, fattening concoction. And instead of the usual accompaniment of penne draped in red sauce, Jann had substituted the fried potatoes, green peppers and onions from the Italian sausage dinner. “It’s fabulous,” she said.

I had toyed with the idea of ordering the sausage dinner myself, but I’d overheard Mussorici talking about the dishes they’d planned to add to the upcoming menu — including a lightly fried, then oven-grilled chicken Parmesan. I asked if I could have a preview, and I’m glad I did — it bears no resemblance to the defrosted, deep-fried chicken patties that one typically endures at chain Italian joints. Fiorello’s chicken is fresh, moist and plump, with just the hint of a fried crust, and it comes laden with the long-simmered sugo.

Ned had polished off a generous order of garlicky skewered chicken spiedini, but he insisted on dessert. And upon hearing that both the cannoli and the cheesecake were made in the restaurant’s kitchen, he shocked me by ordering both. Jann and Ned raved about the cannoli (a dessert I’ve avoided ever since Talia Shire used one to poison Eli Wallach in The Godfather, Part III). The dense, creamy cheesecake was the confection that won my affection.

The place started getting busy only as we were leaving, but the clientele was obviously in the mood for theatrics, particularly one well-dressed but not exactly demure woman at a nearby table who yelled, “Fuck you, fucker!” into her cell phone.

Frank would have loved her.