Rough and Reddy

So few restaurants are left in the West Bottoms, it’s hard to imagine there ever was a vibrant restaurant scene on the district’s lonely streets. But in the days when the Bottoms were home to Kansas City’s busy stockyards, the now nearly barren stretch of Genessee Street that extends from the Livestock Exchange Building to Kemper Arena was packed with hotels, billiard halls, shops and cafes.

It was a man’s world down in the gritty, smelly stockyards, and the restaurants that opened around the perimeter had names reflecting their cowboy clientele: the Rancher’s Restaurant, the Buck Horn Bar & Grill, the Bull Pen. Only the Golden Ox, the 52-year-old brainchild of Kansas City Stockyard president Jay Dillingham, endures as a reminder of the neighborhood’s brawny past.

Across the street, Sutera’s Old San Francisco Restaurant, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in July, is still the neighborhood newcomer. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that this long, narrow dining room — dominated by the massive wooden bar running along one wall — had been part of Kansas City history since at least 1906, the year of San Francisco’s infamous earthquake. Its dark-red walls are lined with the framed front pages of yellowed, crumbling San Francisco newspapers whose headlines scream out the horrors of the quake.

But the name came along with the building when the Sutera family took over in 1976, the summer Kansas City hosted the Republican National Convention. The family — Vincent Sutera and his seven sons and two daughters — cleaned up the place, left the newspapers on the wall and added the Sutera name to the sign. They changed the menu to reflect their Italian heritage and began serving pizza, pasta and sandwiches.

“And the only thing that’s changed over the years,” said our young waitress, “is the prices.”

The building, though, has seen change aplenty. The space first opened for business as a printing company during World War I. It has had more than nine lives (and names) over the past eighty years: The Live Stock State Bank, Genessee Lunch, Mrs. Beulah Taylor’s Restaurant, the Vaccine Company Veterinary Supply, to name a few. Now owned and managed by Charlie Sutera, the youngest of Vincent’s sons, the dining room and bar has had its longest tenure as a relaxed place to pull up a chair and get a solid, no-nonsense dinner.

Walt Bodine had told me that Sutera’s served “the best pizza pie in Kansas City,” and I had come to check it out for myself. In all my years in Kansas City, I had passed the brick building that houses Sutera’s dozens of times but had never thought of stopping in. I already had a vibe on what kind of restaurant it was: southern Italian cuisine dumbed-down for bland Midwestern tastes. Spaghetti with red sauce. Spumoni. Vinyl tablecloths and paper napkins.

It is just that kind of restaurant, but with spicier, richer red sauce than I had expected. And the place’s service is so friendly and attentive, the managers of more upscale eateries should come down here to learn a few lessons.

The menu is limited to pizza, such traditional sandwiches as burgers and roast beef, a handful of pasta dishes and a Kansas City strip, none of it pretending to be fancy. I call it home-style Italian, the kind of food my Sicilian grandmother used to make. In fact, this restaurant’s excellent chicken soup tastes a lot like her pastina in brodo, a Sunday concoction of oregano-dotted chicken broth laden with thin circles of sliced carrots, chunks of white meat and the tiniest barley pasta.

On the other hand, my grandmother wouldn’t have known what to think of that great American innovation known as the mozzarella stick. It’s a wildly popular appetizer here, served hot and crunchy under a heavily breaded coating and deep fried until the cheese isn’t dangerously melted but the consistency of soft, tasteless taffy. A friend of mine dipped each stick in a bowl of red sauce and greedily devoured it, licking his lips as if it were a king crab leg. Purists can order an appetizer of meatballs or slices of buttery garlic bread drenched in melted mozzarella.

I suggest sampling one of Sutera’s pizzas as an appetizer instead, since the doughy-crusted creations come in three sizes with twelve possible toppings. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the best pizza in town, but it’s hot, hearty, full-flavored and generously laden with sauce and cheese — and particularly delicious alongside one of the restaurant’s big, cold iceberg lettuce salads, drenched in either an herb-and-vinegar Italian or a creamy ranch dressing. I sopped up the last bit of that dressing with a chunk of crusty bread from a warm loaf that had arrived in a wicker basket.

Other unpretentious dishes, such as a plate of spaghetti simply tossed with garlic, olive oil and Parmesan cheese or a fragrant order of grilled seasoned sausage with sweet green pepper and onions, also evoked the meals of my childhood.

Sutera’s thick slab of cheese lasagna — layers of pasta baked with ricotta cheese and a thick, mildly spiced tomato sauce — came out bubbling hot in an oven-blackened china casserole. And the chicken Parmesan wasn’t the familiar breaded and fried chicken-breast affair but a casserole dish loaded with rigatoni noodles, chunks of chicken breast and tomato sauce and baked under a blanket of sauce and cheese.

Instead of being fresh and thick and rich, however, the gooey, shiny Alfredo cream sauce spooned over cooked fettuccine had an unpleasant, prepackaged taste. It looked like molten vinyl and tasted oily. Far better was the simpler dish my friend ordered: a thick, juicy cheeseburger served on a crusty roll. It came with potato chips and a side of rigatoni with red sauce. I pushed my ersatz Alfredo aside and stared longingly at his dinner.

After eating several meals at Sutera’s, I actually craved spumoni. I hadn’t had a bowl of it in more than a decade; I prefer fancier desserts over the traditional Italian concoction of ice cream and frozen rum-flavored whipped cream. Unfortunately, by the end of each meal I was too full to even contemplate the idea. As they say in Italy: Ma sona pieno fin sopra la testa. I’m stuffed to the gills.