Jimmy Frantze’s new J.J.’s is just that — an original

History might repeat itself, but great restaurants seldom do.

Sure, the Fairway Stroud’s is a passable replica of the original roadhouse, but the new Villa Capri in Overland Park can’t hold a candle to the shabbier but more lovable original on Metcalf Avenue. I don’t believe that the distinctive qualities — good and bad — of the House of Toy, Mrs. Peter’s Chicken Dinners or Stephenson’s Apple Farm could ever be re-created. And why should we want anyone to try?

Perhaps recognizing this, restaurateur Jimmy Frantze has not made the new J.J.’s, in the Plaza Vista building, in the image of the beloved Plaza wine bar that was destroyed by an explosion in 2013. It’s something closer to homage, and on those terms, it’s fairly convincing.

The mystique of the original J.J.’s was indefinable. People didn’t love it for the food, which was never extraordinary but included one or two really good dishes. The wine list was superb, of course, but it inspired admiration, not passion. The staff was remarkably professional — so much so that small idiosyncrasies weren’t on devotion-building display. The appeal was really Frantze himself, a consummate restaurateur with a voice like grated peppermint and a politician’s ability to remember names and faces. Jimmy was J.J.’s. But can he be J.J.’s again?

To backtrack a bit, the original J.J. wasn’t Frantze but rather his former partner in the restaurant called Dos Hombres: J.J. Malone, who put his name on the short-lived Plaza saloon J.J. Malone’s. When James Woodrow Frantze bought that business, in 1985, he simply held on to the initials.

That history and those initials, along with most of his staff and the surviving bottles of wine — some 25,000 vintages had been stored in different locations — are what Frantze has now brought to the new J.J.’s.

“Of course, we couldn’t replicate the first restaurant,” Frantze says. “It was 30 years in the making. We’ll celebrate three decades on February 1. I’m not acknowledging the 18 months we lost when we were closed.”

Like its predecessor, this new J.J.’s is very much a see-and-be-seen venue. Being seen, though, is a bit more challenging. One enters the dining room through a narrow hallway and up a short flight of stairs; twice I saw servers, carrying loaded trays, trip on the passage. Once you’re there, sight is easier than sound. The dining room, vaguely European in style and very attractive, is noisy as hell, and the bar, on the other side of the restaurant, even more so.

Paintings by Mike Savage, including a mural over the bar, help evoke the original restaurant’s sensibility, but the new J.J.’s is a very different restaurant, even if chef T.J. Stack (formerly of the Savoy Grill) has reproduced the last menu served in the 910 West 48th Street building before the explosion.

“It’s what my customers wanted,” Frantze says, “and I made a promise to bring that menu back.”

The customers he means — wine-sipping regulars of the dark and clubby original (I swear I saw the same people perched on stools there in 1985, 1995 and 2005; I can’t say whether they even went home at the end of the night) — are sure to thank him for reviving the Paco shrimp. (For the unversed, the starter consists of oversize crustaceans stuffed with horseradish, wrapped in bacon and deep-fried.) Twenty years ago, I might have objected to it as an unnecessary holdover from the 1980s. But I’m ready to yield. I’m not snobby enough to resist the combination of crunchy bacon, briny shrimp, a sensible dab of horseradish and a delectable roasted-pepper puree. I love this dish.

It plays well here with another retro classic: sautéed mushrooms, sleek with garlic butter and dappled with fresh herbs, spooned onto brioche toast. It’s made to go with a robust red wine, but it’s thoroughly tasty even with sparkling water.

Frantze’s tribute to his restaurant’s history hasn’t prevented him from calling for small tweaks. One of the best dishes on the current menu is a bowl of fettuccine blanketed in a hearty ragu of braised wild boar, from Texas. “We used to import the meat from Italy, but it got too expensive,” Frantze says. “But we’re using truly wild boar. They’re running around all over the place in Texas.”

It’s a terrific dish — Stack braises the boar in wine and pancetta, and it’s sumptuously flavorful — and one of the few items that didn’t originate at J.J.’s. Frantze offered the pasta at Frondizi’s, the Italian restaurant he closed in 2007. (Frantze says Stack had to convince him to add a less-complicated dish of penne pasta with house-made meatballs and fresh marinara. “I was hesitant,” he says, “but it’s a great old-fashioned dish, and we’re selling a lot of it.”)

At $28 a la carte, the boar pasta is not a cheap plate. But it seems almost budget-minded compared with the $45 veal osso bucco I ordered one night. It tasted good but not great; it needed to be served with gremolata and, more important, risotto or pasta to hold the dish’s fragrant stock and its notes of green olives and lemon zest. Yes, osso bucco is a labor-intensive dish, and veal shanks aren’t cheap (that’s why so many local restaurants now make it with pork), but at Frantze’s price point, this version should come on a souvenir platter.

The $50 diner should instead order the $49 center-cut filet or the $46 rack of lamb. The latter, a signature J.J.’s dish, is worth every damn cent.

Frantze was briefly in discussions with a stylish bakery about desserts for J.J.’s, but he says he had an epiphany before a deal could be struck: “Our customers don’t want fancy sweets. That’s not what J.J.’s is.”

It would be fair to say the sweets that are on the J.J.’s dessert tray are unstylish. But they’re well chosen as potential finales to the cuisine here. A dense cheesecake, made by a local baker, and a boozy slice of bundt cake (created by Craig Adcock) are more than adequate. The house-made chocolate mousse is creamy. And one of the imported sweets, a lemoncello layer cake, at least feels intoxicating. My server that evening insisted that the alcohol bakes out of such a dish, but she just as easily could have persuaded me of the opposite.

“She’s an excellent saleswoman,” Frantze says, proud of his staff.

The truth is that the employees at J.J.’s — including two of the most professional managers in town, former restaurateurs Joe Avelluto Jr. and Joe DiGiovanni — have earned that pride. Collectively, they offer the kind of perfection that can only be created — not re-created.

The new J.J.’s is a brand-new creation, then — and it’s very possibly better than the first.