Parkville’s Iron Horse bistro is on the right track

T he romantic days of dining on trains — real dining, with good food and cloth napkins and waiters — went the way of Pullman porters and Fred Harvey restaurants a long time ago. I still fantasize about what dining cars must have been like in their heyday, but I have to settle for living vicariously through old movies, such as when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint share a luxurious meal in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

I’ve eaten in old train cars rehabbed as restaurants, but in none quite as interesting as that architectural oddity in downtown Parkville: an old car and a caboose linked by a wooden-frame structure and an elaborate deck. It has been the location for several dining spots over the last decade, including two Mexican restaurants. But the setting, close to English Landing Park, hasn’t been particularly successful as a dining destination. The Japanese steakhouse up the hill is still looking for a new tenant, and, across the railroad tracks, the former Power Plant Brewery sits empty, occasionally used for special events.

But it seems that there’s always an ambitious soul willing to gamble on that rail-car space, so it’s never vacant for long. The current tenants are restaurateurs Thomas Belisle and Mike Garcia, who opened The Iron Horse: An American Bistro in April. The name is a nod to the dining rooms as well as to the real locomotives that noisily pass by the restaurant throughout the day and evening. The tracks are so close, in fact, that the structure sort of shakes and rattles as the trains whiz by. On the night I was dining in the caboose, it was an almost unreal experience: For a second, I thought the caboose was moving, too.

I was surprised to discover that the Iron Horse’s food is pretty damn good. I have to admit that my expectations weren’t high; there hasn’t been a terrific restaurant in this venue yet, and chef Garcia’s menu, which I looked at several weeks before I actually ate there, wasn’t that impressive. I would have called it diner fare with pretensions. Delusions, even.

One afternoon, I stopped in for a late lunch with my friend Bob, who read aloud some of the descriptions on the starter list. Something called Southwestern tapas, he announced, was described as “a flour-and-corn blended chip served tapas-style with ancho-braised black beans, pico de gallo and fine cheeses, micro greens and striped with a cilantro lime sour cream.”

Sounded like upscale nachos to me, but Bob was game and ordered it. When it arrived, we saw that instead of chips, Garcia had created little fried empañadas, each a bit bigger than a 50-cent piece, filled with the wonderful braised beans and topped with the pico de gallo, greens and cilantro lime cream. They were absolutely delicious but apparently a culinary fluke — on my second visit, I ordered the tapas again, and they were constructed on those flour-corn chips, just as the menu described. But they were still extremely tasty.

I tried another starter, a plate of fried root chips. This was a visually appealing jumble of delicate, tissue-paper-thin lotus root, turnip and sweet-potato slices served with a “signature sauce,” which the waiter told me was a mixture of sour cream and horseradish. Maybe I got a different concoction because the dipping sauce with my mess o’ roots was a spicy, chile-flecked number with no discernible horseradish flavor.

We were eating outdoors, on the deck, which has a beautiful view from one direction of the old Park University spire peeking up through the trees and the Missouri River from another. At first, we’d been seated inside, in the long railroad car, but there were no other customers in the place, and the narrow space gave Bob the creeps. “It feels like a scene from The Shining,” he complained.

It’s nicer outside while the weather cooperates. The afternoon was cool, so I had a hot sandwich. The Iron Horse Reuben seemed to be on toasted instead of grilled marbled rye, and it wasn’t especially generous with the corned beef, but the corned beef was house-made. Bob had the scampi dinner: linguini in an excellent creamy catfish-butter sauce tossed with mushrooms, peppers and onions and sided with two big old hunks of grilled bread. “It’s wonderful,” he raved. “Really wonderful.”

Desserts were not so raveworthy. Bob liked his skewers of grilled pineapple and wedge of grilled peach on vanilla ice cream a lot more than the pumpkin-bread pudding that I ordered. No two chefs make bread pudding the same way, but this flavorless mess was dry and visually unappetizing. There’s nothing worse than an ugly dessert.

A few nights later, I returned for dinner with Martha and Carol Ann. Once again, we were the only people in the restaurant. “We’re pretty busy on weekends,” the waitress told us as she led us to the solo table in the caboose. “But weeknights can be slow.”

Not until we sat down did I learn that Martha is on a super-stringent diet. It’s nearly as draconian as bread and water, except she’s not allowed to eat bread! Because the Iron Horse menu has a “build your own salad” option, she picked out a few ingredients, and Garcia created an artistic array of sliced iceberg lettuce, roasted turkey, grilled asparagus and fresh strawberries. Martha squeezed fresh lemon juice on it and enjoyed every bite.

Maybe I was feeling sympathetic because I ordered Garcia’s vegan corn tamales. They were fantastic! Three fragrant tamales, nearly as thin as pencils, were dotted with kernels of fresh corn and bits of red pepper and topped with a thick, jade-green, smoked poblano salsa verde, then sided with a mound of those ancho-braised black beans (they were so flavorful, I had the server confirm that they had been stewed in vegetable stock).

Carol Ann thought the 14-ounce pork-loin chops were a shade too salty; the menu says they’re “soaked in an oak and apple brine,” but the apple-cider glaze toned down a bit of the brininess, and the side of delicately spiced fresh apple-walnut chutney had a wonderful autumn flavor. The accompanying garlic mashers were very good, but the standout side dish was the asparagus stalks dusted in panko crumbs and lightly fried. Now there’s my idea of a great vegetarian dish!

We passed on dessert. There were only two, and I couldn’t face that bread pudding again. But it had been a first-rate dinner, maybe even the kind they used to serve on dining cars. Before we left, a train did pass the restaurant, rattling our caboose and the dishes on the table. “It’s like we’re really on a train,” Martha said, indulging in her own romantic fantasies.

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