Our critic is a sucker for Succotash, thanks to its new location and new staff
Before Beth Barden opened a restaurant, she taught sex education, so she’s a straight-talking woman. She knows that some people had issues with her first Succotash, the sassy little bruncheonette operating in the City Market for eight years. She admits that she had problems with the small, awkwardly designed space and its ridiculously tiny kitchen. Barden will even agree that there were a few servers who rubbed some customers the wrong way.
“There was this perception that they were all these young hipsters who didn’t care about giving attentive service,” Barden says. “And in a couple of cases, that was true! That’s why very few of the old staff came over with us when we moved the restaurant to the new location. We have a terrific new staff now.”
I’ll raise a cup of coffee to that. I’ve eaten at the new Succotash at 26th Street and Holmes five times now, and the new servers — Ben, Niles and Angie — along with Venus Van Horn, the theatrically named new general manager, are as personable and professional as they come.
The food is better, too. I don’t know whether that’s because Barden and her staff finally have a well-appointed kitchen or because Barden finally gave herself permission to make some serious edits to the old menu. “The breakfast menu is pretty much the same,” she says, “but the lunch menu is drastically different. In the old location, we had customers that were so attached to certain dishes that they’d tell me they would never come back if I took it off the menu. Well, when we moved, I took everything off the lunch menu except the BLT and the Cobb salad.”
Tomato soup is still on the menu, too, but Barden changed the recipe when she revamped the lunch menu for the new location, which opened in November in a two-story brick building that housed a Meiners grocery store for the first half of the 20th century and the Dutch Hill Bar and Grill for the second half. Barden and her boyfriend, Marco Pascolini, have done an amazing job of renovating the formerly dark, smoky saloon. They installed new storefront windows and a glass entry door, uncovered a long-concealed side door under layers of plaster, decorated the original bar with strips of shiny plumbing copper, tiled the 100-year-old support columns with glass, and repaired the walls (“You wouldn’t believe how many places that had been kicked in,” Barden says) and the original pressed-tin ceiling and the creaky wooden floors.
Unlike the City Market location, which I always found to be uncomfortable and cold — winter or summer — the new Succotash is as cozy as someone’s living room, right down to the soft, white leather sofas that Barden bought on sale to use as banquette seating for the tables on the perimeter of the dining room. My friend Truman prefers Barden’s joint to the other clubby neighborhood spot, You Say Tomato, a couple of blocks to the south. Succotash, he insists, “is bolder, brighter and more fun, and you don’t have to order at a counter.”
To each his own, I suppose. Barden has bigger ambitions for her restaurant, anyway. She’s waiting on a liquor license and plans to start serving dinners in late February. Her real dream is to be open 24 hours a day, like the Detroit restaurant that her grandparents operated in the 1920s. “It was called the Delmont and was open seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” she says, “serving everything from breakfast to Delmonico steak.”
The new place is already open seven days a week, serving pancakes, omelettes, and biscuits and gravy in the morning and sandwiches and salads in the afternoon. Pascolini hasn’t finished building new stools for bar seating, so the staff uses the bar surface to display pastries, including plates of croissants from City Bakery.
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Barden might want to reconsider that approach. “I’m a croissant connoisseur,” one of the servers whispered to me, “and these lack true Gallic joie de vivre.” I’m afraid the waiter was right. I tasted a pretty marzipan-filled croissant and found it neither flaky nor buttery enough to pass muster in Paris. “But they’re fine for Kansas City,” Truman said as he dipped a hunk into his cup of coffee. “Do you think people really care?”
I do. Truman, however, had more of an issue with that morning’s doo-wop; he thought the music was too cheery and he complained until the waiter turned it down. Then he complained about the whirring of the juicer and the clattering in the kitchen. “I wish they would turn the music back on,” he whined.
A former waiter, Truman can be a pain-in-the-ass patron, but he knows what he likes. He raved about the eggs Benedict, here a tower constructed of house-made beer bread, grilled and layered with succulent smoked salmon, fresh spinach, scrambled eggs, and a light dill hollandaise dotted with capers. “It’s beautiful and delicious,” he said. “Here, take another bite.”
I demurred. I had my own plate of eggs, thick-cut grilled bacon, and a wonderful airy pancake whose edges literally hung off the edges of the plate. I’d eaten everything, including the big pile of home fries, before Truman had taken a second sip of his “handcrafted juice,” a combination of carrot, orange, pink grapefruit, ginger and beet called Ninja Sunrise. “Look at this shade of crimson,” he said, holding up the glass. “It’s the same color as the soup dripping down Jaimie Warren’s chin in the painting across the room.”
I refused to turn and look at the enormous painting of the artist Warren (who’s also a frequent Pitch photographer) sloppily slurping soup. Succotash regulars tend to either love or detest the painting; some think the tomato soup looks too much like blood. Me? I’m a notoriously messy eater and don’t want to be reminded by looking at an image of someone sloppier than I am.
I was on my best behavior during different lunches at Succotash, although I did knock over a glass of water while dining with Tony, and I nearly dropped my sandwich on the floor while trying to make an emphatic point during a meal with Walt Bodine and Laura Ziegler of KCUR 89.3. Luckily, I got to finish the Succotash version of the classic Monte Cristo, which Barden calls the Count of Monte Delicious because it’s essentially a first-rate ham-and-cheese creation on three layers of Hawaiian french toast. The sandwich, made with a sexy Derby sage cheese, is luscious. Walt loved it, too.
The lunch fare is basically upscale diner fare: a stylish tuna melt with havarti cheese; homemade egg salad; a roast-beef sandwich with caramelized onions and horseradish blue cheese; and a vegan creation with hummus and grilled vegetables in a spinach tortilla. The tarragon chicken salad, prepared with dried cherries and pecans, was excellent. Barden knows that a lot of her customers are vegetarian, so there’s a silky pâté made with mushrooms that was so good, my meat-loving friend Bob ate the whole damn thing.
On that note, I’ve only rarely tasted a vegan dessert that warranted more than a second bite. Though full of good intentions, they’re often dry and flavorless. But Barden makes her own moist, fudgy vegan cupcakes that taste as decadent as the bad-for-you kind — maybe even better. Interestingly, the not-vegan s’mores brownie should have been more sinful but paled in comparison.
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Be warned, though: During my last lunch at Succotash, I got a parking ticket for allowing my car to stay 15 minutes too long in a one-hour zone.
“One-hour parking,” Truman fumed. “Who only takes an hour to eat lunch? It’s positively uncivilized!”
The City Market might have been more congenial for parking, but even with some kinks still to be worked out, the new place is such a vast improvement over the former location that I’ll suffer the ticket for Succotash.
