Renée Kelly’s Harvest: farm to Renée Kelly to table
I keep waiting for some enterprising TV producer to build a reality show around Renée Kelly.
She’s a natural for the Food Network: a young, photogenic and smart chef and restaurateur, ready to be captured in her namesake venue, a century-old stone farmhouse in a Kansas City suburb. The star’s vivacious personality would be on display, as would an eclectic staff and a larger-than-life mother who plays a dominating role behind the scenes. If you added some local color from the hamlet of Shawnee, you’d have serious video competition for the likes of Paula Deen and Robbie Montgomery.
Her eight-month-old restaurant, Renée Kelly’s Harvest, is waiting for its big break, too. Kelly has been serving food in this remarkable building since 2004, but her business centered on catering and special events until she decided to take the gamble and turn it into a full-service, farm-to-table restaurant (open only for dinners from Wednesday through Saturday). Lest you miss the farm-to-table part of the concept, there’s a blackboard sitting on the mantel of one of the two gas-fueled fireplaces in the main dining room that lists the night’s regional purveyors. On a recent Wednesday, Two Sisters Farm (lettuce); Cultivate Kansas City (produce); and the Goode Acres Farm in Wathena, Kansas (produce), were chalked up.
Kelly’s is hardly the first local restaurant to use regional farm products, but in her neck of the woods (you pass an Applebee’s and several other chain operations on the way to Harvest), it feels a little revolutionary. Yet she has fitted this trend inside a throwback, to a dining style that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s: a restaurant inside a former private home that hasn’t quite stopped feeling like a residence — the long-razed Wishbone Restaurant on Main Street was probably the best example of this — and serves home-style dishes. The menu here isn’t a nostalgic tribute to the days of fried chicken and Swiss steak (though “grandma’s chicken pot pie” and roast chicken are on there right now), but it does attempt to spin traditional favorites toward the modern.
Because Harvest features dishes based on seasonal produce, the menu changes every six weeks, Kelly says. The one from which I recently sampled is a hybrid of the winter menu and a planned spring revision. (“We haven’t actually had a spring yet,” she told me last week.) The winter holdovers are hearty and filling — I’m glad that this extended cold weather allowed me to eat a plate of succulent, exquisitely tender short ribs, braised in beer and perched on a hefty mound of three-grain risotto. Another night, a thick sirloin arrived perfectly grilled and still sizzling, fragrant with fresh garlic and topped with buttery, layered Anna potatoes. It was heavy, sleep-inducing food — welcome comfort to the snow-weary on another cold night.
Harvest currently offers two variations of ravioli, one of them quite clever: a starter of tissue-thin pasta dumplings stuffed with house-grown Swiss chard, crunchy pecans and parmesan, and dappled with a savory — not even a hint of sweetness — mahogany pumpkin cream. The other, an entrée-size ravioli, pillows spoonfuls of braised rabbit and vegetables under a chunky, pretty blanket that mingles jewel-like cubes of buttered carrots with braised fennel.
I asked Kelly why she calls her roast-chicken dish “Happy Chicken” (which suggests something less than sanguine from a low-rent Chinese menu): “The chickens are free-range,” she told me. “They lived happily.” In their presumably pleasant afterlife, the birds are brined in salt, molasses, star anise, pink peppercorns and juniper berries. By the time the meat reaches the table, it’s moist and flavorful under an evanescent amber skin, hot from the oven and sided with a dollop of perfectly fluffy polenta and dark-green puffs of garlic-sautéed kale. I’ll never know whether the poultry I ate experienced joy, but I came close.
I enjoyed the chicken with one of Kelly’s least conventional side dishes: soul-inspired greens — in this case, chewy heads of pak choy (“It’s like bok choy’s cousin,” our server explained) and chard, sautéed in molasses to give it a subtle, caramel sweetness.
One of the servers, Keith Cheeseman, is a former baker who also works in Kelly’s kitchen. He takes credit for the excellent sliced bread and one of this restaurant’s finest desserts: a wedge of supple, delicately spiced four-layer carrot cake that comes generously doused with ginger syrup. There’s a personal pie (pecan during the cold months), which can be topped with ice cream, and there’s also a velvety crème brûlée. Kelly couldn’t resist attempting a version of a novelty that has become perhaps too familiar lately: a dessert based on that cloying campfire creation, s’mores, served deconstructed. That means chewy hunks of house-made marshmallows and chocolate-chunk cookies. It’s messy to eat and only modestly satisfying, even if you’re a Scout.
Harvest’s servers may well be former Scouts, given their keen sense of attention, uncanny ability to answer any question (about the menu, the many lives of the old house, Shawnee politics) and cheery demeanor. You’re not sure whether to tip them or hand them a merit badge. Their skill and polish help make Kelly’s restaurant an exceptionally appealing dining experience. Those who tend not to search out great meals farther west than the Prairie Village Shopping Center will miss out if they don’t make an exception. Kelly’s culinary style is worth investigating — you should discover her before cable does.
