Original Zin

There’s no art to grilling a good hamburger or steak, and it really doesn’t require mastery in the kitchen to bake a cake or roast a chicken or whip up egg whites for a lemon meringue pie.

However, a handful of local chefs deserve to be called artists for their skill, imagination, courage and discipline. Most of them are quite young, like Colby Garrelts at Bluestem and the American’s Celina Tio, and they remind me of the famous quote by painter Edgar Degas: “Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50.” Not every chef under 30 has talent, but 26-year-old Jeffrey Scott, the new executive chef at Zin, certainly does. He’s one of the reasons why the restaurant continues to be an important artistic presence in the Crossroads District. Even after five years, the place is as refreshingly original as any new painting or sculpture displayed during First Friday gallery openings.

And you have to admire the restaurant’s owner, Alex Pryor, who had a distinct vision of what he wanted the sophisticated, upscale Zin to be (and stayed true to that vision, even when the economy was bumpy and he had to lower his prices) and had some foresight about the neighborhood, too. When Pryor opened his sleekly designed restaurant in the spring of 2000, who would have thought that luxury lofts would open up all around him, the elegant 1924 Main would take over the grimy old Dixie Belle space in the Rieger Hotel, and the vacant building across the street would be transformed into a cabaret nightclub called Bar Natasha?

“Did I predict the change in the neighborhood? Not entirely, but it did make sense that if there was going to be new life downtown, revival typically follows the artists,” Pryor says. “That’s where people want to go. This neighborhood seemed like the best chance for that to happen.”

Since opening his doors, Pryor has had to hire only three executive chefs. (Shelley Rash and Derek Nacey preceded Scott.) And he has given each of them enough creative freedom to put their own imprint on the menu. Scott arrived at Zin with solid credentials. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1999, he worked for Jean-Georges Vongerichten at the celebrity chef’s namesake restaurant in New York City for two years, rising up the ranks in the Jean-Georges kitchen, which Scott describes as “really hard work but fun.” It was a universe away from his hometown of Excelsior Springs, where a teenage Scott knew he wanted to be a chef the minute he got behind the line at the now-defunct Crossroads Café. “I was very aggressive about wanting to be a cook,” he says.

But Scott missed the “wide open spaces” of the Midwest and moved to Kansas City in 2001, working in several local restaurants, including Hannah Bistro. He came to Pryor looking for a position just as Nacey was thinking about leaving. “Jeffrey told me it was time he either opened his own restaurant or became an executive chef,” Pryor says. He promoted Scott from sous chef to the executive position in May.

Vongerichten’s creative influences are evident in the citrus vinaigrette served with the superb pan-seared scallops and in the light touch on the sauces accompanying the meat dishes. Even this summer’s most talked-about appetizer, Scott’s tower of fresh watermelon, goat cheese and chopped pistachios, was inspired by a similar Vongerichten creation.

But Scott took off on his own path toward the unlikeliest combination of ingredients, and it’s gorgeously successful thanks to the contrasting textures and flavors: the sweet pink melon, the creamy goat cheese, the crunchy pistachios and unexpected bursts of flavor from fleur de sel, the expensive French sea salt hand-harvested in Brittany. Only food snobs will really get off on the unusual salt, but my friends Bob and Merrily were entranced by the freshness and inventiveness of a concoction that’s not quite a salad but is, in any case, a most unconventional appetizer.

Scott says he’s keeping it on the menu as long as he can get good watermelon. The rest of the summer menu he’s changing slowly, instead of introducing a new one all at once. Since my first return visit in mid-July, Scott has replaced his tuna sashimi tart — which may break Merrily’s heart, because she fell in love with the thin pink slices of fresh tuna arranged over a puff pastry tart topped with a fennel purée. And the silken foie gras terrine will stay on the menu in some incarnation, despite its political incorrectness. “Too many of our customers want it,” Scott says. “It’s become identified with the restaurant.”

He also isn’t toying with Zin’s tradition of offering at least one dish each of duck, beef, fish, pork and lamb. The summer’s grilled beef-strip loin in a vaguely Asian caramel soy sauce was wonderful, but it’s already been reincarnated with a coriander-mushroom sauce and chive mashed potatoes.

Remaining unchanged is a vegetarian ravioli stuffed with wild mushrooms and ricotta, sautéed spinach and toasted almonds on a bed of vivid-green sweet-pea sauce that’s more than a purée of summer peas. The sauce tastes luscious because the base is butter, garlic and ginger — which is the only way to dazzle up the plebeian pea, as far as I’m concerned. Beef-loving Bob shocked me by ordering the dish — and loving it.

When I found out that my dinner companions both disliked lamb, I ordered Scott’s spice-crusted rack of lamb with cucumber-yogurt sauce so I could have it all to myself.

It was a brilliant decision, except that it left me almost too full to contemplate dessert. So I helped myself to a few bites of Bob’s sculptural assemblage of chocolate ganache teamed with a hazelnut meringue, and a few bites of Merrily’s coffee crème brûlée. Both dishes are also Scott’s creations: He’s the pastry chef, too.

The following week, after a particularly grueling day, I wandered into Zin and wearily climbed onto a stool at the glass-brick-and-concrete bar. Not for a Zintini (which Merrily liked, despite the sweetness of the black-raspberry and melon liqueurs) but rather a bracing glass of iced tea and a soothing plate of those big, beautifully browned seared scallops floating on a tart citrus vinaigrette with bits of oranges and crunchy toasted hazelnuts.

I should have stopped right there, but another new Jeff Scott dish caught my eye: bacon-wrapped salmon with smoked corn sauce. Lately I’ve been bored with bland, farm-raised salmon, but this virile spin made the fish dish sound intriguing. It was better than that, actually. The soft, pink salmon steaks were bound with strips of apple-wood-smoked bacon and artfully positioned on a puddle of robust yellow corn sauce smoky from the roaster — Scott smokes and roasts the ears of corn — and the hint of adobo sauce added to the garlic, onion and cream.

Soon my pretty bartender, Susan, brought me a little dish of lavender sorbet to taste. I was charmed by the gesture but one bite was enough for a lifetime — I prefer the perfume of fresh lavender in a sachet drawer, not in a dessert. I considered ordering the molten chocolate cake, but sometimes too much of an artistic experience leads to sensory overload.

That’s when I realized the brilliance of Zin’s minimalist interior design. It doesn’t compete with the visual and sensual innovations on the plates.