Latke Luck
In little more than a month, the newest chain restaurant imported into Johnson County has become the busiest — customers have been standing in line to wait for a table at TooJay’s. That’s good news for the restaurant’s owners, Roger Gondek and his partners (who also own the Kansas City Hooters franchise). The local TooJay’s is the first outside of Florida, where the concept was created in 1981 and there are now thirteen outlets. Rumor has it that a Plaza location could be next.
Even though it’s located in the upscale Fountains shopping center, a glamour spot TooJay’s is not. Servers are young and a little awkward — in a sweet kind of way, considering that they’ve been hit with a rush; the place is much more popular than the owners seem to have anticipated. The dining rooms, with their lemon-yellow walls, bare Formica tabletops, paper napkins and turquoise vinyl booths have all the allure of a 24-hour coffee shop. If anything, this comfortable, squeaky-clean suburban deli is closer in style and spirit to a Cheesecake Factory than New York’s sassy, gritty Carnegie Deli or Chicago’s Zweig’s. But the food is the stuff you’ll find in any first-class deli, from Miami to Milwaukee. It’s inspired by the distinctive cuisine that writer John Mariani describes as the “rich, fatty foods beloved by the Jewish immigrants” who arrived in America just before and after the turn of the twentieth century.
Eastern European dishes such as bagels, lox, pastrami, knishes and cheesecake arrived via Ellis Island “with far less flamboyance but much greater impact than German food,” Mariani writes in America Eats Out. And after a century, most of these Jewish dishes have been completely absorbed into America’s culinary vocabulary — so much so that TooJay’s stuffed cabbage, which swims in a slightly sweet, mildly vinegary tomato sauce, tastes exactly like my Protestant mother’s. Considering her cooking skills, that isn’t necessarily a good thing — but I was curious, so I called her and asked where she learned to make stuffed cabbage. From her mother, of course, who had gotten the recipe from a Jewish neighbor in Cincinnati.
Most of the twenty entrées on the TooJay’s dinner menu (there’s also a larger all-day menu) are recipes that cross cultural boundaries. A meat lasagna and a shepherd’s pie have been adapted from other ethnic cuisines; a half chicken roasted with rosemary would be familiar on the dinner table in any Jewish, Italian, German, English or French home, and it’s a traditional American prairie dish. At TooJay’s, however, it’s not a memorable chicken. After eating breakfast and lunch there, my friend Shifra had extolled TooJay’s virtues (“Such incredible chopped chicken liver! And the whitefish is out of this world!”). But when she joined me for dinner, ordered the chicken and took the first bite, she looked crestfallen. With its buttery-colored, crispy crust, the dish looked divine — but it was parched and tasteless, reducing Shifra to a whisper: “The dinners aren’t as good as the lunches or the breakfasts.”
I wouldn’t go that far. TooJay’s dinner offerings are simply hit-or-miss — and when they miss, you just butter another piece of rye bread.
In fact, you can get filled up even before dinner — which comes with a generous plate of that bulky, fresh rye bread and a house or Caesar salad. (The Caesar is seriously overdressed.) And the appetizer selection is too seductive to pass up.
Alas, though, there’s hardly a thing on the “starter” list that isn’t heavy or fried. Thick potato pancakes come with sour cream and applesauce; nearly as big as saucers, these glorious latkes are flavored with lots of chopped onion and fried so they’re crunchy and golden outside, steaming and soft inside. Want some more cholesterol? Order a basket of Vidalia onion rings dipped in a light beer batter and fried, served with a pink “remoulade” sauce that tastes more like hot Thousand Island dressing. I would pass on the one truly fat-free offering, an expensive and utterly bland little bowl of tabouleh; it was 90 percent chopped parsley. (There was so little bulgur wheat in the concoction, it could have been a garnish.)
Parsley is TooJay’s favorite herb. It’s used to brighten up everything from pasta to the unforgivably mushy carrots accompanying the spongy, bland Mom’s Meatloaf dinner. This dish tasted worse than my cooking-impaired mother’s, and it came with a mound of mashed potatoes blanketed with gluey brown gravy that evoked memories of my high school cafeteria.
The same brown gravy weighed down the old-fashioned pot roast dinner that Shifra’s husband, Bob, ordered, but the ample slices of meat were so tender and flavorful that the slick puddle wasn’t as offensive. But Bob didn’t eat his carrots, either.
If nothing else, TooJay’s wins points — and lots of them — for a superb matzo ball soup. It isn’t always hot enough, I discovered, but when it is, it’s a heavenly bowl of fragrant homemade chicken soup filled with large chunks of breast meat, slices of carrots, onion and celery, and two tennis ball-sized puffs of matzo dumplings flecked with more of that parsley. TooJay’s also offers a platter of whitefish and kippered salmon — and not many places in the area serve this kind of ethnic fare.
Also good — but extraordinarily rich — was the garlic chicken pasta, which tosses penne, broccoli and sweet peppers in a garlicky cream sauce. On an earlier visit, my friend Carol ordered liver and onions, which I consider more old-fashioned than pot roast (and harder to find, except in cafeterias), and thought the tender shavings of liver made it “absolutely superb.” I’m hardly a fan of this dish but was goaded into taking a bite — and had to agree that it was exquisite, mildly flavored and smothered in translucent curls of sautéed onions.
I’ve not sampled the breakfast dishes, which TooJay’s serves until 11 a.m., though the seven featured omelets are available through dinner. But lunch offerings, including char-broiled hamburgers and the traditional “deli classic” sandwiches, come in huge portions. (I noticed that about a third of the customers left with doggie bags.) TooJay’s delivers its Reuben — a good touchstone for judging deli sandwiches — in novel style, rolling up slices of corned beef and Swiss cheese with a light smattering of sauerkraut, like a wrap, and plopping them onto grilled rye bread so the sandwich looks so big, you hesitate to even pick it up. But it’s all an illusion; the sandwich turns out to be more manageable — and less loaded with meat — than it looks. Still, it tastes terrific, slathered with Thousand Island dressing and sided by a little portion of tasty, crunchy cole slaw.
It’s impossible to eat all of that without first thinking of dessert, since the trays of cookies, brownies, éclairs and iced layer cakes (nearly as big as automobile tires) are cleverly situated in the deli department at the front of the restaurant.
Some of these delicacies look better than they taste: A chocolate cake made with a layer of cheesecake was disappointingly dry; the slice of a flaky Napoleon was too sugary. However, a carrot cake layered with thick cream cheese icing was impressive, as was the Banana Dream layer cake, a banana spice cake iced with a velvety frosting sprinkled with chocolate chips. One wedge of cake was so big that four of us armed with forks couldn’t polish it off.
Before we sat down to dinner, Shifra had said TooJay’s was the kind of New York delicatessen she had been praying would come to Kansas City. Even though she was disappointed with dinner, she thought it was the best Jewish deli in the city. But you don’t have to be Jewish. Just hungry.
