La Vida Coco

Yes, the name of the 2-month-old restaurant at 151st Street and Nall is Coco Bolos New Mexican Wood-Fired Grill & Cantina. But the owners don’t want customers to think it’s, you know, a Mexican restaurant. They insist that Coco Bolos “has a lot more to offer than enchiladas and tacos.”

That’s true, though it should be noted that the place does serve enchiladas and tacos as well as burritos, quesadillas and nachos. What has surprised the diners at the new Leawood location are the dishes that one doesn’t find at most traditional Mexican-American restaurants: a grilled pork tenderloin marinated in plum and hoisin sauces, Caribbean barbecued shrimp, smoked salmon bruschetta.

“Our menu is very eclectic,” says Peter Doucette, co-owner with brothers Bobby and Newton “Bud” Cox. The trio also operate the original, 9-year-old Coco Bolos in Manhattan, Kansas. “We have a little bit of everything.”

Well, that might be a slight exaggeration. The Coco Bolos menu isn’t a crazy quilt of international culinary choices like, say, the novel-length list at Cheesecake Factory, where one can start with Thai lettuce wraps and Vietnamese shrimp rolls before devouring a bowl of Hungarian goulash. Mexican and Tex-Mex dishes dominate the Coco Bolos menu, but there are a few unexpected alternatives, including St. Louis-cut pork ribs seasoned with a South Texas dry rub and smoked over hickory wood. Oh, and crème brûlée.

Doucette and the Cox brothers had planned for several years to open a version of the Manhattan operation in a bigger market. They chose Leawood, Doucette says, “because it’s a fast-growing area with a lot of people and a lot going on.” The new restaurant quickly caught on with the neighbors in the surrounding new subdivisions — there was a 45-minute wait for a table on a recent weeknight. But my midtown friends only have to hear “151st Street” to quickly lose interest.

“Oh, I don’t want to drive out that far,” one friend said when refusing my dinner invitation. “Isn’t that practically in Lawrence?”

On my first visit, for Sunday brunch, I had to present Marilyn, Patrick and Debbie with the illusion that we were taking a day trip, even though it took just 30 minutes to drive to the restaurant from the Plaza. Marilyn, who is old enough to remember when Kansas City barely extended much past 80th Street, was amazed that there could be a restaurant way out in what used to be farmland. The area is now dotted with a crop of taupe-colored mini-mansions that all look exactly alike.

Doucette says the restaurant’s name comes from a kind of high-grade African wood, though the restaurant uses good old American hickory for smoking and grilling meats. It’s a good choice, too, because you can smell Coco Bolos a block or so before pulling into the parking lot.

“The place smells great,” Debbie said as we climbed out of my car. “And you say it’s Mexican?”

Well, it’s sort of Mexican, I tried to explain as we walked into the dining room, which is painted in bold shades of maize, emerald and tomato-red. The dishes on the Sunday brunch menu are almost all inspired by Mexican cuisine. Still, in a few cases, even that inspiration was a stretch. For example, when I asked our server if the Chorroz toast was anything like the sugar-dusted fried pastries, churros, that are so popular in Latin American countries, she shook her head. “It’s more like French toast,” she said.

The menu describes it as “traditional thick French toast with a New Mexican kick.” I asked the waitress to identify the “kick” in the recipe. “We use Grand Marnier when we make them,” she explained.

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A little of the French orange-flavored liqueur might give the toast a kick, all right, but it wouldn’t be particularly Mexican. The country-fried steak with skillet potatoes really did have a south-of-the-border kick, though. It was slathered with jalapeño gravy.

Marilyn ordered the wood-fired breakfast pizza, available with bacon or in a more vegetarian-friendly version with portabella mushrooms. She ordered the latter but got bacon. She wasn’t too disappointed because the bacon was extra crispy and piled on a crunchy grilled crust with scrambled eggs, pico de gallo and melted cheese. I thought it was delicious, but Marilyn said the rest of us had made wiser choices. Debbie, for one, raved about “Amanda’s Eggchiladas,” soft tortillas stuffed with chorizo, eggs, onions and potatoes and blanketed with Coco Bolos’ excellent, pork-rich chile verde sauce.

The breakfasts here weren’t cheap, but the food quality and service were superb, so I didn’t cringe at the 10-buck plate of huevos con chorizo made with mildly seasoned homemade chorizo, green chiles and onions. Patrick’s open-faced Coco Frittata was certainly a pretty dish, but he was unimpressed. “It’s a little too dry,” he complained. “But the potatoes are delicious.” We split an order of the French — I mean Chorroz — toast. It didn’t taste any more kicky than you’d find in any local diner. Maybe they should make it with tequila.

A couple of days later, I returned to Coco Bolos for an early dinner with Ned, my most critical and unforgiving friend. He usually loathes suburban restaurants, but he adored everything about Coco Bolos, from the mural over the bar to the postmodern metal bar stools to the imaginative menu. “It feels so fresh and original,” he said. “It’s casual but stylish enough to feel more upscale than any other Mexican restaurant.”

“But it’s not Mexican,” I said.

“Of course it’s Mexican,” he snapped back at me as the waitress brought over a metal bowl piled with salty tortilla chips. The handcrafted salsas (the restaurant serves four varieties) cost an extra $3.95, so Ned ordered guacamole instead, which was just $2 more. “What’s not Mexican about this place?” he asked.

To prove him wrong, I chose one of the house specialties with Eastern leanings, the Thai Pan barbecued pork. It was extraordinarily good: pieces of grilled, plum-and-hoisin-marinated tenderloin drenched in a sweet and spicy peanut-chile sauce and served around a mound of thick noodles, also drenched in the same nutty, mahogany-colored sauce.

Ned also decided to ignore the Mexican offerings and went for the Gulf Trio Mixed Grill, which he decided was one of the most wonderful things he had eaten in months. The heap of excellent roasted-mushroom risotto was surrounded by bacon-wrapped shrimp, a moist Cajun-seasoned pork-loin filet and Jamaican jerk chicken. It’s not the kind of dish one finds in Mexican or Tex-Mex restaurants, particularly in a suburban strip center. Ned loved the rich risotto, the shrimp and the slab of pork, but he was less kind in his appraisal of the jerk chicken. “They jerked it too much,” he said. “It’s a little tough.”

In another culinary homage to New Orleans, Coco Bolos offers its own version of the famous Brennan’s Restaurant dessert bananas Foster. At Coco Bolos, the dessert isn’t prepared tableside, and it omits the banana liqueur from the recipe, but other than that, it’s a nearly faithful reproduction of the original: bananas sautéed with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and pecans, then set aflame with dark rum and served over ice cream.

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“It’s fabulous,” Ned said, practically swooning. “It’s everything you want a dessert to be.”

The only other dessert on that day’s menu was a creamy crème brûlée, tasty enough but probably not recognizable to anyone who’s had the real thing — silken custard hidden under a brittle burnt-sugar crust — in a French restaurant.

There’s not a puffy fried sopaipilla or ball of “fried” ice cream in the joint, which is a very good thing. Not just because it’s the rare local restaurant that does even a halfway decent job with those sweet offerings but because Coco Bolos isn’t really a Mexican restaurant. That’s what the owners say, and they’re sticking to their story.

Honestly, I’m not sure how I would categorize a place that serves tostada salads, Creole-blackened salmon and po’ boy sandwiches. But as long as the place is friendly and attractive and the food’s good, who gives a mierda?