It’s the menu that’s brewing at Martin City Brewing Company

I had to see it to believe it.

A friend of mine told me that she had been taken to a tiny saloon in Martin City where the wait for a table was an hour.

“An hour?” I asked, shaking my head in disbelief. “Was the food worth waiting an hour to eat?”

When I think of bar food, particularly small-town bar food, I think of nachos and burgers and fries — satisfactory eats but hardly worth a 60-minute wait. But the nine-month-old Martin City Brewing Company — which does serve nachos, burgers and fries — has an ambitious young chef. A veteran, at age 25, of several restaurants in the metro, Andrew Parker has already changed the menu at this 80-seat tavern three times.

“It’s a seasonal menu,” Parker says. “We change with the seasons.”

Parker’s moods play a role, too. A couple of weeks after a caller on KCUR 89.3’s Walt Bodine Show phoned in to rave about a Philly cheesesteak-style sandwich on Parker’s menu (called “The Marty”), Parker took it off the menu.

“I replaced it with a meatball sandwich,” he says. “A great meatball sandwich. The Marty wasn’t great.” (I tasted the Marty before it was banished, and I agree. It didn’t live up to the radio rave.)

So the place has a talented chef who actually gives a damn about his food. What the bar and grill doesn’t have — yet — is a brewery.

“We’re hopeful it will be open by the end of this year,” co-owner Matt Moore says. “Make sure to underline hopeful.”

Moore says the brewery will occupy a different building. The 100-year-old structure that houses the restaurant is already too small for the volume of business that Moore and partner Chancie Adams are doing. Who knew that Martin City (the hamlet was annexed by Kansas City in 1963) was so hungry for a Cheers-like bar and café?

Moore did. For most of the 20th century, this building was the Martin City Pub. That saloon was owned and operated by Moore’s grandfather, R.C. Van Noy — creator of the iconic Jess & Jim’s Steakhouse and R.C.’s Restaurant & Lounge, the best-known restaurants in south Kansas City for decades.

“The Pub served beer and cheeseburgers,” says Moore, who purchased the building a couple of years ago. (Its last tenant had been a Chinese restaurant.) The plan for the brewery-restaurant was always to serve upscale pub fare. What Moore and Adams didn’t expect was for the venue to become a popular family restaurant. On both of my visits to the restaurant, I saw plenty of small children.

But after 8 p.m., the customer base noticeably shifts to sports fans (there are monitors everywhere), regulars from the neighborhood (including at least one regular “girls’ night out” group) and guys whom Moore calls “beer geeks.” The Brewing Company may not have its own brew yet, but it boasts 18 beers on tap and 50 kinds of bottled beer.

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On my first visit to the restaurant, my friends and I were sitting at a table in the upstairs dining room (much less noisy than the lower-level bar area), and two raucous hoops fans were on stools, chugging beer and watching a basketball game. One of the duo got so worked up that he let go a rip-roaring fart. He turned around to see if anyone had noticed the sonic boom.

“Don’t look around,” hissed my friend Martha. “Don’t embarrass him.”

Embarrass him? I detected a distinct pride in his posture, as if this bar were not just a place where everyone knows your name but also a place where they know your flatulence.

And it’s easy to work up a little gas in this joint. Some of the best things on the menu are the cheesiest. There’s a truly outstanding macaroni and cheese (side dish or full-sized), and the decent grilled cheese is made with sourdough bread and layered with molten provolone, white cheddar, smoked gouda and gruyere. The nachos come laden with black beans and a blanket of melted cheddar. This restaurant’s logo is an old locomotive, which might symbolize all the tooting taking place.

The new menu, introduced last week, is a collection of sandwiches and salads (including a fried-goat-cheese salad) but no actual entrées. “We have a daily entrée special,” Parker says. “That way, I can experiment with a different entrée every day.”

Parker has been ordering more fresh fish for his specials (it’s Lent, after all), including cod that he often sautés with a little salt and drapes in a beurre blanc. But the bread-and-butter dishes are the basic bar classics: a great burger; and a first-rate Reuben, made with chunks of tender, slow-roasted corned beef, house-made sauerkraut and Parker’s own Thousand Island dressing. The brassy house-made ketchup has become so popular that Moore has arranged to bottle it and sell it to local stores. (I’d buy a bottle.)

Instead of the expected fried staples (pepper poppers, breaded mushrooms, mozzarella sticks), Parker serves up arancini: golf-ball-sized spheres of breaded risotto balls with a center of molten cheddar. You don’t often see this delicacy outside Italian restaurants, but Martin City Brewing Company does right by the recipe, presenting it with a dollop of surprisingly fresh-tasting marinara.

Vegetarians, no matter how much they love beer or sports, will have a tough time with this menu. The macaroni and cheese is veg-friendly, and so are the risotto balls, the Greek salad, the grilled-cheese sandwich, and the sautéed vegetables (an interesting and tasty mix of spinach, mushrooms, peppers and onion), but that’s about it. Oh, wait — there’s also a fried-egg sandwich, cooked with sage and garlic, topped with tomato and mozzarella, tucked between two slices of Roma sourdough and slathered with garlic aioli. It’s the least boring fried-egg sandwich in the metro, but the garlic quotient is so high that an entire tin of Altoids won’t chase off the aroma.

I wanted to ask Parker if the egg was fried on the same grill as the burgers and the Italian sausage, but the vegetarian I was dining with operated on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. “If I don’t know, it’s not true,” she said. (I’ll tell: “We clean the grill carefully after each sandwich is prepared so there’s no chance of meat tainting a nonmeat sandwich,” one of the managers explained later.)

I sort of thought that this brewpub’s dessert list might include pastries made with beer or ale. A Boulevard Wheat bread pudding, maybe? “When the brewery opens, we will,” Moore says. “But we have hired a local lady to make our desserts, including small individual pies we call ‘cutie pies.’ “

Cutie pies? I’ll pass. The name alone gives me gas.