Market Report

The City Market would seem a natural spot for a bustling restaurant community. Many local chefs buy their produce and herbs fresh there on weekends, when the outdoor stalls are packed with vendors. So why aren’t there more restaurants?

If the neighborhood had been able to survive the explosive days of the ill-fated River Quay in the 1970s (those mysterious 1977 nightclub bombings were a public-relations nightmare), it might have been the Market, not a stretch of West 39th Street, that turned into the city’s restaurant row. Only longtime Kansas Citians can remember when the neighborhood surrounding the Market was a hip dining destination, with customers sometimes taking red double-decker buses to now-forgotten places such as the Victoria Station, Yesterday’s Girl and Papa Nick’s. But when two popular nightclubs on Fourth Street went kaboom, customers stayed away for decades.

After dusk, anyway. The Market itself has always been a draw, even as the fortunes of its historic neighborhood (literally and metaphorically cut off from the rest of the city by the I-70 loop) faltered. A proposed arts district never quite turned the hulking nineteenth-century warehouses into a SoHo-style scene of theaters, galleries, cafes and lofts — despite some game attempts by developer Mel Mallin, whose vision was light-years ahead of its time. Loft construction is now booming, but theatrical performances in Mallin’s Artspace never caught on. And a gallery “district” has only recently evolved in the Crossroads neighborhood several blocks south.

But signs of new restaurant life are blossoming. Just east of the Market lies the sleek and sophisticated Oldham. And in the Market facility itself (the longtime home of the wonderfully smoky Winslow’s Barbecue and the most beloved diner in the city, Cascone’s Grill), the two-month-old Succotash has turned an unlikely retail space into a lovably oddball “bruncheonette” serving breakfast and lunch six days a week and dinner on Wednesdays and Sundays.

The cozy cement-floored dining room feels a shade claustrophobic during cold weather (when staffers pull down the turquoise garage door and abandon the outdoor tables) but has enough color, spunk and joie de vivre to overcome the intense intimacy.

It’s cool, in the beatnik sense. At night the dining area seems even smaller, although burning candles squatting on the half dozen 1940s aluminum-and-plastic kitchen tables give it a pretend-bistro quality, as if some imaginative suburban couple had decided to turn their two-car garage into the Sugar Shack for a night, complete with way-out light fixtures.

But it would be too easy to dismiss the laid-back little joint (where the smoking policy is “we don’t frown upon it,” says co-owner Tate Baker) as campy fun; eating there is like hanging out in the grooviest clubhouse in town. Unlike some of their artier urban contemporaries, Baker and partner Beth Barden are serious about their food, the service and the cleanliness of their business — up to a point. The restaurant’s only bathroom is a tidy but primitive facility at the top of an unwieldy spiral staircase. And while I could overlook the retro plastic tumblers, the shakily nervous waiter and the old coffee that was bitter as bile, let’s always keep some TP in the WC.

Happily, the food was vastly more refined than the ambience. Barden and her kitchen crew can turn out some of the liveliest chow in town. That goes even for the restaurant’s namesake dish, the traditional Native American combination of fresh corn, lima beans and chopped peppers. (The name comes from the Narragansett word meaning “broken into bits.”) It’s used as a mildly spiced “salsa” surrounding an appetizer of tender, lightly grilled pancakes made with Peruvian blue potatoes and tart cheddar cheese.

“We chose the name,” Baker says, “because the dish is an earthy mix of things. Like this restaurant. Our menu is kind of a hodgepodge.”

More specifically, a commendable hodgepodge of ethnic culinary styles and down-home cooking. Traditional diner faves get the gastronomical equivalent of a Bob Mackie makeover: A grilled cheese is made with smoked gouda and artichoke hearts; a roast-beef sandwich gets packed with a two-inch stack of rare beef slices and laden with caramelized onion, spring greens and a punchy wasabi cream sauce. Even a tuna melt is fashion-conscious here, boasting tomato and a bubbly slab of melted Vermont cheddar on thickly sliced multigrain bread grilled to a perfect crackly texture.

One day I brought my fussy friend Carol to lunch, knowing she prefers breakfast to any meal. After agonizing over the choice between peanut-butter-and-banana pancakes or the Egglet Sammich, she decided on the latter, a crumbly drop biscuit smothered with a fried egg, bacon and cheese. My California Club sandwich came densely layered with roasted turkey, smoked bacon, onion, tomato and a sprightly pesto aioli. And my friend Bob was smitten by the restaurant’s house salad, tossed with sun-dried tomatoes, crumbled goat cheese, purple onion and a pesto-buttermilk dressing.

Though a less common occurrence, Succotash’s twice-weekly dinners are no more formal than lunch. The menu is usually limited to two changing entrees with a couple of appetizers and a featured salad. On a chilly Sunday night, I attacked a plate of cognac-doused “rumaki,” a free-form affair of chicken livers, crispy bacon and water chestnuts pan-seared and brought to the table in an intoxicating sauce, which we sopped up with toasted French bread.

In fact, free-form was the description of the night. The “lasagna,” served with rich slices of seared tenderloin, was little more than a strip of soft pasta enveloping an emerald-green blend of pesto and ricotta. My friend Robin liked his roasted duck but thought the accompanying topaz-colored citrus-squash sauce “would work better as a winter soup.” The duck should have been more crackly, but I loved the sauce — even if it was too precious for the side of tooth-gratingly sweet potato ravioli.

That ravioli was even sweeter than the massive slab of citrus layer cake that Carol and I had shared on an earlier visit: a “parti-colored” affair of moist orange, lemon-lime and raspberry layers held together by a ’55 Chevy-blue icing. It looked like a stage prop, but its pucker-inducing, lemony bite countered the buttery, sugary icing. Other house-made desserts were all equally stunning, but it took a braver diner than I to finish off a full meal and then indulge in, say, Grasshopper Cheesecake.

But Succotash has the moxie to go where no other bruncheonette has gone before. It’s an excellent omen for the post-millennium River Market.