La Dolce Velveeta

A year ago, I was sitting in a bustling restaurant in Rome, drinking an espresso and smoking a cigarette. The food wasn’t particularly good, but the people watching was: The place was on the popular Via Veneto, where Federico Fellini filmed scenes for his movie La Dolce Vita more than forty years ago. The movie was considered erotic and scandalous in its day, and its success only enhanced the street’s reputation as a place to hang out and cruise for romance.

Fellini’s movie made an international star out of Marcello Mastroianni (who played a dreamy-eyed tabloid journalist) and turned the film’s title into a mantra. What translates as “the sweet life” has since been appropriated by restaurateurs from Texas to Thailand as a sexy name for coffee houses, upscale dining rooms, bakeries, lowbrow sandwich shops and Internet cafés. It’s the name for a jazz club in Hong Kong and a sex club in Dusseldorf. All of the food-related La Dolce Vitas serve Italian fare, although you can get crème brûlée at the restaurant in Cairo and schweinebraten at the place in Stuttgart.

You can also order a nice slab of corn-fed Midwestern tenderloin at Kansas City’s version of La Dolce Vita. But even though it’s an attractive dining room, there’s not much vita after dusk, and the place has zero sex appeal. Even if the tan brick Town Center Plaza survives into the next century, 119th Street will never be the Via Veneto.

There’s espresso at La Dolce Vita, but no smoking. As for people watching, the restaurant’s staff provokes merely a flicker of interest. One dark-haired waitress is positively striking, and there’s a thin, copper-haired waiter who looks like a young David Bowie and walks like a runway model.

On my first visit, I admired this waiter’s posturing from afar. But on a return trip, when I was actually seated at one of his tables, I was less amused. He spent more time vogueing his way around the room than paying attention to his patrons. Even at his most lackadaisical, though, he evoked that Felliniesque sense of cultivated decadence.

The other servers all come on like cheerleaders. “We have a special tonight! Five-dollar martinis!” was Steffie’s way of introducing herself to our table on that first visit. Her face fell when none of us ordered one, though she perked right up when describing that night’s dinner specials: jumbo sea scallops over acorn squash risotto, or a plate of roasted pork loin over red Himalayan rice.

Her enthusiasm wasn’t misplaced. I was excited myself that this six-year-old restaurant now offers something as sophisticated as dinner specials. The place started out as a lunch spot, with far more attention paid to the dessert tray than to anything resembling a meal. OK, the place did serve a few light dinners after sunset (mostly panini sandwiches and salads), including a couple of traditional Italian-American supper choices like eggplant parmesan and chicken parmesan.

But when veteran restaurateur Tom Johnson took over last year, he brought in chef Tina Warford. Sho kept the two a la parmesan choices but seriously beefed up the rest of the menu. It’s now possible to get a solid dinner here, complete with soup or salad, for less than $20. That’s the dolce news. But even though those dinners are lovingly prepared (in an absurdly tiny kitchen) and exquisitely presented, they’re amazingly bland.

Where was the punch of pungent, stone-ground mustard in the so-called mustard sauce that Warford drizzled over slices of tender pork loin? Why was a pesto sauce made with almonds and basil so dominated by the sweet nutmeat that there was barely a hint of the Mediterranean herb?

“That must be a subconscious decision of Tina’s,” Johnson explains. “It’s nothing we’ve ever discussed. The menu does reflect what customers want.” At the same time, Johnson says, he doesn’t buy the theory that Johnson County restaurants often dumb down recipes to appeal to suburban palates. “We have a very well-traveled, well-educated customer base. They don’t require blander tastes. Our menu is comfort food.”

And comfort food consists of less-bold, more-soothing dishes. So this restaurant’s eggplant parmesan (which is both chewy and crunchy, thanks to a batter liberally laden with grated cheese) comes draped in a mildly seasoned tomato sauce. No Italian would recognize the restaurant’s “antipasto” plate, thanks to its deli-counter sensibility: slices of salami and provolone cheese, some paper-thin folds of prosciutto, a couple of oily marinated artichokes and tiny olives — along with far too many of those vinegary, pale-green pepperoncinis.

“They throw those on the plate to fill up space,” sneered my friend Patrick. “No one likes them or wants them.”

No one at our table did, anyway. The only truly sensual appetizer was a white soup bowl heaped with steamed mussels; the shiny clump of half-opened black shells rose out of an amber, wine-scented broth with a discreet touch of garlic. Alas, though, a tart-sized disc of warm brie came with a timid sage-walnut sauce and was surrounded by soggy oyster mushrooms.

Small dinner salads were made of fresh-tasting and peppery-pungent greens and splashed with a sharp balsamic vinaigrette. Instead of the ersatz Caesar that’s a staple in these parts, Johnson insists that an alternative salad be something that resembles a Caesar but doesn’t require garlic or anchovies. (Both can be dangerous words in Johnson County.) So Warford has come up with a look-alike creation of crunchy romaine delicately tossed in a light, citrusy lemon vinaigrette and dusted with grated parmesan.

But she drapes that dull sage-walnut sauce over luscious pan-seared sea scallops (on a mound of pearly risotto without a trace of the advertised acorn squash). Pillows of “lobster” ravioli were stuffed with a vaguely fishy cheese and coated with a veneer of “sauce” that the menu claimed was made from Roma tomatoes, basil and white wine but tasted like Campbell’s soup. When something as elegant-sounding as lobster ravioli sinks this low, it might as well be stuffed with a processed cheese food.

That’s what’s so disappointing about La Dolce Vita. I know the dish wasn’t made with canned soup or stuffed with processed cheese, but something that sounds as elegant as lobster ravioli needs to taste like more than a subpar cheese ravioli.

My friend Bob, however, was ecstatic over a juicy tenderloin of beef blanketed with a layer of melted gorgonzola and sided with chunks of buttery Yukon Gold potatoes and threads of caramelized onion. Ironically, it’s the most American offering on the menu but by far the most robust in terms of flavor and seasoning.

When the dessert tray came around, I was wowed by the six visually stunning pastries. I was pleased to note that the four best-looking and most inspired choices were the ones Warford made in her own kitchen: a delectably creamy crème brûlée; a glass cup artfully layered with all the sinfully rich ingredients for velvety tiramisu (I sampled a very similar version in Florence); and the Diplomatico, a concoction of rum-drenched pound cake and chocolate mousse swathed in chocolate ganache and sliced into chubby squares.

But one holdover from the previous owners needs to be renamed immediately. The Crater Cake was a pie-shaped wedge of chocolate mousse on a crust of chocolate pastry that had, apparently, once been a puffy cake. The servers will launch into a blow-by-blow account of this cake’s preparation and tragic fall (thus the crater), but the story is as uninteresting as the chewy cake-turned-crust. Call it a mousse pie and be done with it.

The regular crowd at this La Dolce Vita is old enough to have watched the Fellini film on the big screen and, presumably, to have been turned on by it. But sensuality — on and off the plate — is the missing ingredient at a restaurant that has yet to live up to its famous name.