Play With Your Food
There’s no business like show business — unless you’re talking “eatertainment,” a word coined to describe the Benihana of Tokyo Japanese steakhouse chain. While it’s a stretch to call Kansas City’s teppan-yaki steakhouses — such as the new Suki — “dinner theaters,” they do offer comic entertainment along with the meal. The entertainment, however, is on a par with the food, and neither is going to win any awards, either for culinary achievement or theatrics.
Over at the New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park, the owners — Richard Carrothers and Dennis Hennessy — have discovered that the culinary side of the operation is just as important as what gets produced on stage. That’s why the nine-year-old facility is called the New Theatre Restaurant. Their two previous dinner theaters, Tiffany’s Attic Dinner Playhouse and the Waldo Astoria, weren’t called restaurants for good reason.
“Food wasn’t that integral to the concept then,” says Carrothers, who remembers that when Tiffany’s Attic first opened in the early 1970s, he and Hennessy hired staffers from Myron Green Cafeterias to oversee the food. “And that’s what we had: cafeteria food. In the early years, we served things like baron of beef, canned vegetables and fritters.”
Homestyle cooking presented along with a show was enough of a novelty in the 1970s. But when they were building the multimillion-dollar New Theatre, Carrothers and Hennessy decided to make the food much more important.
“Our biggest coup was hiring Mark Rohman, our executive chef and vice president, away from Yia Yia’s,” says Carrothers. “We had to find someone who could change the preconceptions about what dinner-theater food had been.”
Rohman wasn’t easily sold on the idea: “I didn’t remember the food at Tiffany’s Attic or Waldo as being memorable,” he says. “My peers thought I would be nuts to take the job.”
But Carrothers and Hennessy, despite their legendary reputation for micromanaging, decided to give Rohman and his sous-chef, Wayne Cox, a free hand. The first thing Rohman did was redesign the kitchen. “We turned it from a place that prepped food one day and reheated it the next to a real à la carte kitchen,” Rohman says. “Now we don’t start cooking until 5:30 p.m., and we start serving an hour later so everything is fresh.” No more canned vegetables. No fritters (though older customers still ask for them). No baron of beef.
The attention to food has paid off: Customer comment cards frequently note the food before commenting on the shows. But not all of Rohman’s menus have won high marks. The Asian-inspired buffet served before last year’s Song of Singapore was roundly criticized by the theater’s patrons. “By the time we started Americanizing the Asian dishes to make them more palatable to our clientele, we realized that the dishes were like anything you’d see on any Chinese buffet,” Rohman says. “People hated it. We learned a valuable lesson.”
Rohman redeemed himself at the next show, with “greatest hits” from the theater’s new cookbook, Between the Acts. He was relieved to get high customer scores again.
As for Carrothers, who recently adopted a 2-year-old, “dinner theater” has a whole new meaning: “Now,” he says, “I go to Chuck E. Cheese’s.”
