Second Honeymoon

Kansas City doesn’t have the greatest history when it comes to second owners taking over popular restaurants. Though the union between restaurant and operator starts out with the best intentions, it can be like a second marriage that goes weirdly awry. The most famous example, even after a quarter-century, is Stan Glazer’s ill-fated and ultra-expensive renovation of that legendary fried-chicken restaurant The Wishbone. At Carter-era interest rates, Glazer poured a million bucks into the aging Main Street mansion that had housed The Wishbone for 33 years, turning a genteel, family-style dining room into a combination restaurant and disco called Stanford’s East. Two years later, construction workers tore down the building.

Even if they don’t change the concept completely, most second owners opt to divorce themselves from the original name. Thus the Bluebird Café became the Bluebird Bistro, Mother India was reincarnated as Udipi, and the Boulevard Café morphed into La Bodega (no connection to an earlier La Bodega at 651 East 59th Street that turned into Sarah’s).

When Jim Marks, the mustachioed 14-year veteran of the Kansas City-based PB&J restaurant chain, decided to purchase Paulo & Bill from founders — and namesakes — Paul Khoury and Bill Crooks last year, he insisted on keeping the name as well as the wood-burning pizza oven and the secret recipe for red sauce. Most of the staff stayed, too, including Steven, a jovial Renaissance Fair veteran who has been a server at the Shawnee restaurant since the heavy wood-and-colored-glass doors first opened in 1996.

The restaurant was always popular, which is why there was a considerable ripple of surprise in the local hospitality trade when Khoury and Crooks sold it last autumn.

“The offer was too good to pass up,” Crooks says. “And we knew Jim wanted a shot at running his own restaurant. He really cares about the place and the employees.”

In reality, Paulo & Bill always was the oddball in the PB&J family. Its location — smack in the middle of suburban Shawnee — had a lot of influence on the restaurant’s appealing but unsophisticated Italian-American culinary style. Ditto for the generous portions, the easy-to-swallow prices and the nurturing service. I always considered it to be a dowdy country cousin to the more soigné Grand Street Café or Yia Yia’s Eurobistro, though by Shawnee standards — where low-priced chain restaurants vastly outnumber independently owned operations — Paulo & Bill is practically fine dining. After all, it incorporates all of Hal Swanson’s trademark decorative elements: Murano-influenced light fixtures; sleekly upholstered booths; colorful tilework; oversized, amphora-style pottery.

But on weekends, the place is still loaded with families (including noisy, squalling brats) who have piled into the booths to take advantage of deals such as a hearty heap of veal parmesan and fettuccine Alfredo — enough to feed four — for about $39.

That’s great if you’re feeding una famiglia di quattro, but the only thing less interesting to me than family-style dinners is actually sitting next to a family with a bunch of poorly behaved prepubescents. On the rare occasions when I make a foray into this neighborhood, it’s usually to see a movie at the Westglen, across the parking lot, and I’ve always insisted on sitting in the kid-free bar. And in the past two years, I noted that the food was increasingly hit-or-miss, as if someone had been trimming corners in the food-quality department.

Happily, since Jim Marks took over eight months ago, he has spiffed up the dining room and bar and hired chef Dan Drake (another PB&J vet). Drake has retained the best stuff from the old Paulo & Bill menu and added a few new dishes that are mostly terrific.

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OK, I tasted one clinker — a roast pork loin stuffed with spinach, almonds and goat cheese — on my first return to the restaurant. But owner-manager Marks says Drake was on vacation on that busy Friday night. “Not that that makes it right,” Marks says. “Everything that comes out of our kitchen should be perfect, no matter who’s on duty.”

I’ll second that emotion. But since I was dining with two ex-restaurant people, Bob and Lou Jane, we could cut the kitchen some slack; by then, we’d enthusiastically devoured a plate of plump, juicy scallops floating on a delicately smoky, pumpkin-colored pepper sauce. Even better was the appetizer of fried eggplant, sliced and layered with fresh mozzarella and thick, red tomato slices — a tower of red, white and gold, all drizzled with a jade-colored pesto vinaigrette.

The problem with the beautifully marinated roast pork loin, Lou Jane explained, was that it had been cooked much earlier in the evening. By the time someone sliced and heated it for us, our slab was ridiculously dry and flavorless, and we barely nibbled at it. Our server noted our fallen faces and deducted the dish from the bill. But our other entrées were perfect. Bob’s 8-ounce beef tenderloin, the Mama Mia, dripped with cabernet butter and arrived with creamy whipped potatoes and fresh green beans. And my cannelloni, a dish typically mangled by ersatz Italian restaurants, was right on the money here: in the pollo di spinaci version, neatly sliced pasta tubes stuffed with chicken and spinach and bubbling with a fragrant tomato and basil sugo and a garlic-scented cream sauce.

I would have loved dessert, but we’d already bought tickets to see The Stepford Wives and had to make a quick dash across the parking lot. A couple of nights later, though, Bob and I returned for a more leisurely Sunday supper on a hot and humid evening. It was unbearably sticky outside, so I had a renewed appreciation for Paulo & Bill’s dark woodwork and cool, comfortable booths. Instead of an appetizer, we split one of the wood-fired pizzas, made with a remarkably light, cracker-thin dough (which is now tossed and baked to order). Ours was a mozzarella-and-goat-cheese concoction with slices of grilled portabella mushrooms, bits of asparagus and roasted red peppers.

If I’d had any discretion, I would have stopped right there, but I was ravenous, so we also shared the steak Deburgo and two fat crab cakes perched on a bed of wild rice, freshly sliced corn and sweet peppers. The former — grilled beef medallions ladled with a white wine cream sauce flavored with a hint of rustic oregano — is, Drake says, an Iowa innovation. It was remarkably tender. The crab patties, however, were chewy on the outside rather than crispy, and although the filling was certainly crabby, it needed a little something extra. Bob wanted some kind of rémoulade-style sauce, but our server, the superattentive Kathy, suggested the soothing lemon-oregano aïoli that’s usually served with the calamari. It was the perfect accompaniment.

We were so stuffed that I nearly hid under the table when Kathy returned with the dessert tray, a massive wooden box arranged with waxy-looking display models of the desserts. It was the standard-issue PB&J assortment (including that phyllo-wrapped chocolate blob that I detest), and none really called to me until Kathy pointed to a shiny chocolate cube and announced that it represented a “chocolate mousse cake with fudge icing.” That’s what I heard, anyway. When it arrived, the confection was a lusciously frosted square of fluffy chocolate ganache with a scoop of rich vanilla ice cream.

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“It’s not really supposed to come with ice cream,” Kathy whispered. “I thought it did but was told no after I had already put it on the plate. So I brought it out anyway.”

Give this woman a raise! I’ve always preferred servers who make me the beneficiary of their mistakes, which is hardly ever the case. And as we watched the restaurant start to fill up with Sunday evening diners, I overheard a lot of Shrek 2 chatter. I later asked Jim Marks if the restaurant did a booming post-picture business.

“If it’s a family film,” he said. “Harry Potter‘s been very good to us.”