Power House

At some point between World War I and the Great Depression, many of Kansas City’s hoity-toity neighborhoods got a fatal kick in the head. It suddenly became too costly to maintain the big, drafty mansions that lined Independence Avenue, Main Street and Millionaire’s Row on Troost, so most of them were torn down. The ones that lingered evolved into funeral parlors, nursing homes or cheap hotels, and the fashionable families that had built them fled to southern suburbs such as Mission Hills, leaving relics of the nineteenth century behind.

A couple of places that escaped the wrecking ball were reborn as restaurants, in a kind of culinary trend during the 1940s. That was when the John Soden estate at 45th Street and Main, for example, was turned into a genteel teahouse. Right across the street, the old William Chapman mansion became the Wishbone, a venue for fried chicken dinners and garlicky salads; the restaurant is long gone, but its name lives on in the salad-dressing section at grocery stores everywhere. A few other restaurants took hold for a while in older homes (Victor Hugo’s, the Green Parrot), but they’d all been leveled by the 1980s, victims of drastically changing tastes in food, décor and service. When disco and singles bars were all the rage, prim waitresses and family-style dinners were suddenly so yesterday. Old-fashioned graciousness wasn’t just boring; it was uncool.

But nostalgia can be a potent lure, which is why diners still flock to eat in a renovated mansion such as Rembrandt’s Restaurant or in hundred-year-old farmhouses such as Stroud’s in the Northland or Tuscany Manor in Lee’s Summit. “Sometimes you just want to eat a home-cooked meal in a home,” says a friend of mine who refuses to learn to cook. Who cares if it’s a former home, outfitted with a professional kitchen and a trained staff? The idea is still, you know, homey.

Over on the Johnson County side, just up the hill from a grim stretch of ugly postwar buildings on Nieman Road, Mary and Mark Mollentine have turned a 153-year-old farmhouse — reportedly the residence and headquarters of territorial governor Andrew Reeder in 1854 — into the modestly appointed Governor’s Meeting House. There they’ve created a style of dining that has much more in common with 1943 than with 2003.

“This place is just so civilized,” my friend Carol said after we had settled into our chairs and our server had brought each of us a small, leaf-shaped glass plate decorated with a sliver of milky cheese, a cluster of red grapes, a few dried apricots and a squiggle of smoked chipotle-and-raspberry cream cheese, along with a single cracker. It was a grandmotherly touch, unexpected yet thoughtful, like the “citrus service” that arrives with glasses of ice water. It isn’t enough for a server to offer a mere slice of lemon with the tapez l’eau — there were artfully carved orange and lime wedges as well.

Carol’s daughter, Becky, a New York City-based actress, and Becky’s boyfriend, David, looked around as if they had landed on the moon. We were sitting in the Prairie Room, a tile-floored dining area outfitted with hanging wood cutting boards and whirling ceiling fans. Glamorous it wasn’t. But, as David said, “the real class is in all the little details.” He noted the soft, yeasty home-baked rolls accompanied by individual swirls of soft butter served at room temperature. (“So it doesn’t taste cold and hard,” he said.)

It felt as if the Governor’s Meeting House was some closely guarded secret — only a handful of other customers were in the place. “It’s like being in our own private dining room that no one else in town knows about,” Becky said after she took a sip of crisp Marco Felluga Pinot Grigio. “So don’t tell anyone.”

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But if the Governor’s Meeting House, which began serving dinners to the public only last April (the Mollentines were strictly a catering operation for three years), is inexplicably one of the city’s best-kept restaurant secrets, I’m not going to be party to the conspiracy. Mark and Mary are keeping their place a low-key affair, but the two dining rooms should be as busy as California voting booths. The second time I visited, on a Saturday night with my friends Bob and Larry, only four of the Prairie Room’s tables were occupied, one by a quartet of extraordinarily well-behaved Shawnee Mission Northwest teens on prehomecoming dates. They weren’t just the best-dressed group in the room; they were also the most dramatic. “This cream cheese,” announced a willowy young man in a snappy tuxedo, “is simply exquisite!”

I wouldn’t go quite that far (it’s still cream cheese, for Christ’s sake), but I’d endorse just about everything else I tasted on chef Mark’s autumn menu. We were especially partial to an appetizer of crusty crab cakes splashed with a punchy red-chili-pepper cream sauce, as well as some savory “turnovers” filled with chopped bits of smoky ham, melted cheddar and a dollop of sweet jalapeño preserves.

Mark Mollentine also makes a Caesar salad that’s one of the prettiest in the city: a jumble of fresh romaine in a genuine Caesar dressing, bedecked with a thick, crunchy diadem of baked Parmesan cheese heaped with tender hearts of palm and artichokes. He changes the soup offerings frequently, but his most requested bisque is a creamy concoction of roasted green chiles and shredded chicken garnished with cilantro. “It tastes like melted-down chicken à la king,” Becky said. “And I mean that as a compliment.”

The soup was rich enough that we could have eaten it as a main course, but rich is also the common denominator among the thirteen intensely flavored entrée choices. Becky cooed over a flannel-soft crepe rolled around moist grilled chicken, wild mushrooms and fresh spinach, then dabbled with cheesy Mornay sauce. We all took heaping bites from a fluffy corn cake piled with shrimp and steamed with just a hint of chipotle fire, sided by ruby-red fresh tomatoes. Bob’s gorgeous, thinly sliced, grilled “Flat Iron” steak was a shade too chewy, despite the comforting warmth of its peppery dipping sauce. But David’s scallops were deliciously fat, glazed in a jade-colored tomatillo vinaigrette that rendered them as beautiful as rare Chinese porcelain. Carol’s juicy slab of salmon, brushed with a nearly translucent veil of lemon-tarragon crème, was lightly crusty on the outside, soft and pink inside.

If anything, Mollentine’s kitchen was in finer form on my following visit, during which the typically laconic Larry raved over a shiny hunk of buffalo sausage. “No one could complain about the size of the portions here,” he said. Who was complaining? I was way too preoccupied with my own fork-tender veal scalloppine, served with a mound of slightly doughy gnocchi in a silken tomato-porcini sauce.

Unable to choose among the three dessert offerings, we finally agreed to sample them all. The chunky wedge of chocolate truffle cake dusted with pecans was damn good and definitely preferable to a round, puffy tart baked with amber peaches and gooey Mascarpone. For visual effect, the tiny slices of white-chocolate shortcake speckled with raspberries was clever in a vintage-tea-room fashion but wasn’t much on taste.

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Mary Mollentine, who oversees the dining room while her husband is in the back cooking, let it slip that the old Reeder residence does have a ghost who occasionally makes his presence known on the staircase to the second floor. But after 153 years, it makes sense that the joint would have at least one groovy ghoul. The bigger question is: Where are all the customers?