Soup Days
Johnson County diners can go deli-rious over two new eateries, with the March opening of TooJay’s Original Gourmet Deli on 119th Street, followed by the April 9 opening of the second location for another imported delicatessen, Jason’s Deli, just a few blocks west at 12010 Metcalf. (The first Jason’s Deli is still at 8931 Metcalf.) Unlike TooJay’s, the Texas-based Jason’s offers not sit-down service but a cafeteria-line ordering system. And no matzo ball soup.
Jason’s and TooJay’s do, however, prepare their own soups each day, usually offering four or five versions. Still, it’s not like the days of Bretton’s, the downtown Kansas City landmark that wasn’t ever a delicatessen but served — for thirty years — traditional Jewish dishes. Its founder, Max Bretton, was a rabbi before he went into the restaurant business.
“Every day we offered 27 different soups!” recalls former Bretton’s waiter Ray Starzmann. “I can still remember them. Chicken soup with matzo ball. Chicken soup with rice. Or kreplach. Two kinds of cold borscht. Jellied consommé. Green turtle soup. I could go on and on.”
“There weren’t 27 soups every day,” laughs Debbie Bretton Granoff, Max’s daughter, “but there were a lot of them.”
From 1945 until the mid-1970s, Bretton’s introduced many Kansas Citians to not only sophisticated French cuisine and Cantonese dishes (the Bali H’ai Room was added in 1954) but also Jewish “comfort foods,” such as chicken in the pot, stewed prunes with roast, brisket and potato pancakes and fluffy sponge cake.
“It was the greatest restaurant,” says Starzmann. “I waited on so many celebrities there: Isaac Stern, Roberta Peters, Victor Borge. They would walk over from the Music Hall after their performances to eat Spaghetti Caruso or peaches melba.”
Starzmann especially misses the signature desserts, “like Coupe Mary Bretton,” he says. “It was pineapple sherbet drizzled with green crème de menthe. Doesn’t it sound fabulous?”
There won’t be any fabulous Spaghetti Caruso at the new Europa Cafe (323 E. 55th Street), but there will be Shrimp Louis. Scheduled to open on May 1, Europa Cafe — the brainchild of caterers Scott Cowell (the former manager of the old Venue restaurant) and Gigi Maurer — is setting up shop in the space formerly occupied by Decadenza. Decadenza had a disappointingly short life as a coffeehouse and take-out shop featuring food by caterer Lon Lane, and the establishment closed after its two partners, Dennis Howell and Kaye Miller, had a falling out. Cowell and Maurer are transforming the place into a cozy eatery, with the kind of light lunch fare and desserts they prepared for Cafe Maison (408 E. 63rd Street). In the tiny spot, they’ll serve coffee and espresso drinks in the morning and freshly baked pastries and croissants. And while it won’t be a deli, Europa Cafe will offer carry-out cuisine along with eat-in sandwiches, salads, panini sandwiches and a quiche du jour. Sit-down service in the dining room lasts until 6 p.m., with grilled panini sandwiches, a French country pâté, a New Orleans-style muffuleta sandwich and that great culinary creation from Buffalo, New York: roast beef on weck.
Cowell and Maurer also will serve the sensational baked goods that drew a following at Cafe Maison, including the citron tart and lemon layer cake. Over at Cafe Maison, owner Jeff Fitzpatrick and his staff now are doing the baking themselves, and Fitzpatrick is looking for a new chef.
