Past Due

A few Kansas City restaurants have been sitting on their laurels for so long that they’ve crushed them beyond recognition. Nostalgia is all well and good when it comes to culinary landmarks like, say, Winstead’s. But does that neon-lit temple of greasy flattened hamburgers and joyless service really still warrant such devotion from its apostles? I say no, but I usually say it under my breath; criticizing Winstead’s in Kansas City is tantamount to spitting on Harry Truman’s grave.

Another place that inspires similar devotion is The Corner Restaurant in Westport. While I might not have fallen under the restaurant’s peculiar spell, I always understood why its acolytes loved the place. It was free-spirited, hip and accepting — like its founder, the late Stephen Friedman, whose engaging personality set the tone for the restaurant’s early years.

The Corner must have been the essence of Westport chic when Friedman opened the no-frills breakfast-and-lunch joint on a cold February day in 1980. Westport was still a funky neighborhood then, with only a few hints of the nightclub mecca it would become. Quiche and homemade coffee cake might seem like standards today, but they were undoubtedly exotic in the simpler time when Captain and Tennille’s “Do That to Me One More Time” was the No. 1 song, Michael Jackson still looked human and nobody was talking about AIDS.

Since then, Midtowners have been standing happily outside on weekend mornings — sometimes as long as an hour — to get a table in a restaurant that has always needed a good scrubbing, where the service ranges from giddy to sour. But the crowds outside seemingly had thinned, so I asked a friend of mine, a longtime fan of the Corner, whether my impression was correct.

“I think so,” he said with a sigh. “A lot of the gay clientele that used to come in regularly have shifted over to Sharp’s. It’s less about food, I think, and more that Steve isn’t there anymore. Or the old manager, Gary Campbell. People used to come in to see them. And it helps that Sharp’s serves liquor. The Corner only serves wine and beer, and some of my friends just insist on having a little Bloody Mary or two with their eggs.”

But all restaurants, if they last long enough, go in and out of style like platform shoes, bell-bottoms or Cher. At age 21, The Corner — now owned by restaurateur Rick Atallah, who opened a new Corner Restaurant at 9916 Holmes this year — is a survivor. But unlike Cher, it’s really starting to show its age. But I still heard friends and coworkers talk about how much they loved it and thought, “Are they talking about that same grungy restaurant in Westport?”

So I made several forays back to that old brick building — which, by historic Westport standards, is of relatively recent vintage, built after World War I. Like many Kansas City diners, I have a history with the place: I ate my first Kansas City restaurant meal at The Corner in 1984. It doesn’t look a bit different now, except that the carpet is dirtier, the woodwork needs a fresh coat of paint, the prices are slightly higher and the “art” on the walls diminished my appetite.

I stumbled into The Corner one morning at dawn with my friends Bob and Brenda, fell into one of the ripped leatherette chairs and looked up from my coffee. On the wall were full-size body casts of naked people (many of them fat and saggy) in shades of plum and grape.

“Just what you want to see with your bacon and eggs, isn’t it?” cracked Brenda. “Tits and ass.”

Luckily, we had taken a window table and I could look out onto Westport Road. I dug into a platter of split biscuits covered with a pasty gravy that tasted only of black pepper and the dried red pepper flakes someone had shaken over the surface. The greasy vegetable quiche suffered as well, its broccoli, peppers and mushrooms dried out under a gloppy deluge of cheese. Compared with those disappointments, a hot plate of deflated pancakes was just fine.

Bob was happy with an order of the “Classic Bennie,” a version of eggs Benedict swimming in enough hollandaise to float the Queen Mary. Brenda, always a wild card in the morning (she prefers ravioli to eggs), ordered a BLT on white toast and gave the waitress a dirty look when it arrived on cold, limp bread.

“Do you want me to, uh, bring you some toast?” asked the server, who wasn’t much more awake than we were.

“And make it snappy, sister,” barked Brenda, a veteran waitress herself. Her mood improved only when a young customer walked in wearing a T-shirt we could all appreciate at that ungodly hour; it read “Professional Ass Kicker.”

In spirit, The Corner hasn’t changed since Friedman’s death in 1992. The servers, who don’t wear uniforms, have a laissez-faire attitude that some customers adore and others find annoying. I experienced the full range of responses. Another morning, I was served by a young man with so much bouncy personality, I felt he wasn’t waiting on me but auditioning for a spot in Late Night Theatre’s next show. That day I sampled the “Chef’s Mess,” which turned out to be a satisfying scramble of pork sausage, ham, bacon, mushrooms and red peppers (a nicely filling little number for four bucks, including toast). The apple-cinnamon coffee cake arrived steaming, fresh out of the microwave. Those ovens do a strange number on pastry, turning it from cake to concrete if you don’t eat it all right away — which I did.

A few days later, I returned for lunch with my friend Lesa, an unrepentant smoker. She loves The Corner for that reason: “There’s a nice big smoking section and people don’t treat you like a damn pariah if you want a cigarette with your french fries,” she said as she lit a Marlboro at our table.

The Corner’s lunch menu is an elaborate conglomeration of typical diner offerings (burgers, patty melts, salads) and more exotic choices, such as burritos, baba ghanoush and tabouli. Lesa wanted a thick, greasy cheeseburger stacked with crisp bacon, lettuce and tomato on a sesame-seed bun. And fries.

“They have the best french fries here,” Lesa said as she blew a puff of smoke in the direction of the model-thin femme fatale at the next table, who artfully ordered her lunch while maintaining a conversation on her cell phone.

After waffling between a pita stuffed with hummus, tabouli, tomato and cheese and a more fattening pork tenderloin sandwich, I went with the latter, which transcended its high-school-cafeteria aura after I loaded the bun with onion, mayo and a fat pickle wedge.

“You’re in the mood for a little grease!” the server said, bubbling with forced effervescence. I might have blown a little nicotine in her face, too, if I had been smoking. Instead, I proved her right, devouring every thick, crisp french fry in the basket while trying not to look up at the saggy sculptured belly hanging on the wall above my head.

Some ideas are best not mixed with food. I wanted to fall in love with The Corner this time. I really did. But whatever allure this venerable nook has for its faithful following, it just doesn’t seduce me.