Tacos, pizza, sandwiches — some of the metro’s best lunches are in Kansas City, Kansas

I don’t live in Kansas City, Kansas. I don’t work there, either. But I cross the Kaw with some frequency — to eat.

My Crossroads desk isn’t far from some perfectly fine lunch options. But not long ago, I found myself craving the street tacos at El Camino Real, on Seventh Street in downtown KCK. So I headed over the bridge and, quite inadvertently, launched myself on a weeklong food odyssey. On the way to those tacos, you see, I noticed a new pizza place. And then I started wondering what else I might be missing each weekday afternoon.

Plenty, it turns out.

KCK’s historic downtown has endured more than a few changes over the past half-century, some of them disappointing. I’m thinking of that ill-fated attempt to create a “pedestrian mall.” What a few generations ago was a thriving retail hub is today not much to look at. The stretch of Minnesota Avenue and its surrounding grid that once drew workaday foot traffic is today … quaint.

But a certain earnest quaintness can be a virtue when it comes to lunch. This is the realization that struck me on that recent day when the urge for tacos struck and I could think of no sensible antidote in the urban core on the Missouri side of the state line. What was I thinking? All I had to do was hop onto Interstate 670, cross the river and get in line for those tacos.

This time, though, I paid closer attention to the cafés and pizzerias and bodegas that had flown by unnoticed on previous drives. How many silent promises had I made to myself, over the years, to pull into a parking space in front of Tao Tao or Johnny C’s Deli & Pasta and see why they were such constants? I decided to make good on some of those promises.

But the first place I stopped was one I hadn’t seen before. For good reason: It’s new around here.

Nick’s Italian Pizza (714 Minnesota Avenue, 913-321-1610) is no place for the pizza snob. Nick Brunetti Jr.’s pizzeria, in a corner of a former urban food court, within sight of a Subway franchise, is open just six hours a day, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the menu is solid but unimaginative. But the line to get to the counter grows long during the lunch hour, and for good reason: Brunetti makes a terrific pie, chewy and flavorful, hand-tossed and given ample flavor with fresh marinara sauce that suggests a family recipe. The prices help, too. Two big slices and a beverage go for just $5.50.

Nick’s is named for Brunetti’s Italian-born father, a tribute that’s perhaps part mea culpa. The two Nicks opened a pizza place together a couple of decades ago, but it didn’t go well. Blame a little family pride.

“We had different ideas on how to run the place,” Brunetti Jr. tells me. “So I left and moved to Florida.”

In 2008, he returned to Wyandotte County, taking over his 77-year-old father’s pizzeria when the elder Brunetti’s health began to fail.

“He’s very proud of the changes I’ve made,” Brunetti Jr. says. “I instituted better ingredients and more variety in the kind of pizza we offered. I also added hot chicken wings, Philly cheesesteaks, a club sandwich and a greater variety of salads.”

That variety is fine, but the pizza is the thing here. Most days, there are about a dozen featured pies, including a marinara-slathered deep-dish version that Brunetti insists isn’t a Chicago thing. No, no — it’s a “Nick Brunetti stuffed pizza — my version of a stuffed pizza.” That means, he adds, “I use all the ingredients I have in my refrigerator, including ham, bacon, cheese, vegetables, and we bake it for a long time and ladle our own fresh homemade marinara over the top. We offer it every day, and it sells out very quickly.”

Like Nick’s, most of my favorite lunch spots in KCK are family operations. Several blocks west of the Brunetti operation, for instance, is the humble but locally revered Tao Tao Restaurant (1300 Minnesota Avenue, 913-342-1331), where the owner and full-time cook is 70-year-old Annie Der. She has run the tiny storefront Chinese restaurant for the past four decades. Sometimes her oldest son, Irving, is there to help in the kitchen; another son, Leo, takes orders at the takeout counter.

It’s all takeout at Tao Tao, even if you don’t have to take it very far. Der has added, over the years, a small dining room — two tables, swamped by four big video arcade games. This little-used space is for customers who’d just as soon open their Styrofoam boxes of pineapple chicken or kung pao shrimp on the premises rather than in their cars or back at the office. Taking a few bites lightens the load, after all; the meals here are all sold by the pint or the quart.

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Ask Der how much Minnesota Avenue has changed in her time here, and she shrugs and points to a framed vintage photograph near the front counter. It’s a copy of a 19th-century daguerreotype taken of this building, back when it was C.T. Savage’s Everything Store. Waiting outside in the image are a horse and buggy, just where I’ve left my Ford Focus.

“Everything changes, all the time,” Der says. “But business is better now than it was when I first opened.”

Tao Tao, she adds, is not a philosophical reference. It’s much more about lunch. “In China,” Der says, “tao tao means really busy.”

The menu at Der’s restaurant hasn’t changed much since 1975, which is good news for fans of egg foo young. There are eight different varieties of that dish here, as well as that great Missouri culinary innovation, Springfield cashew chicken, with its breaded, deep-fried chicken in thick brown gravy. It’s way closer in concept to Stroud’s than it is to Shanghai — and I’m grateful for that.

More familiar fried dishes — wings, catfish and great french fries served alongside the signature dish here, barbecue — are daily specials at the six-year-old Big Grill & More (501 North Sixth Street, 913-371-0088). Another family business, it’s owned and operated by the Dantzler family: Louisiana-born Ray and his siblings Jerri, Tracy, Pilmon and Lela.

“We don’t open,” says Ray’s daughter, also named Tracy, “unless there’s a Dantzler in the kitchen.”

The storefront, paneled in old-fashioned knotty pine like a 1940s kitchen, is a lovable mash-up of old-school barbecue restaurant and neighborhood diner. The burnt ends, beef tips, ribs and smoked chicken wings are all outstanding (and inexpensive), but you can also find plenty of satisfaction in nostalgic roadhouse fare. There’s a moist meatloaf (drenched in shiny brown gravy). There are smothered pork chops.

The fact that the Dantzlers have built a business in a location that’s not on a busy stretch of Sixth Street is a testament to their good cooking (and equally skilled meat smoking). Or it could just be the desserts — sweet-potato pie, peach cobbler, pear cobbler — made by Jerri Dantzler Martin. With those delicacies nonnegotiably part of your immediate future, you may need to think twice about ordering that second plate of fried okra.

Family recipes are also the calling card of the 15-year-old Johnny C’s Deli & Pasta (1113 North Fifth Street, 913-281-3663), in a dreary strip center near the courthouse.

“A long, long time ago, there was a fancy restaurant here,” says owner and namesake John Caracci. “Did you ever hear of the Chandelier Room?”

I admit it got by me.

“It’s OK. No one else seems to remember it, either.”

I’m not going to forget the food here, though: ample subs, good hot sandwiches and satisfying pasta dishes. The lasagna dinners, which include salad and bread, cost less than $10 and taste exactly like my grandmother’s. (Caracci’s Sicilian grandmother, like mine, added a pinch of sugar to the sugo.) And Caracci is justifiably proud of his muffaletta: “I make my own olive salad and my own giardiniera,” he says. “And I serve it on a crusty French roll.”

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I was more curious about his Reuben, though. Some places don’t bother slicing their own meats for the sandwich, but Caracci does. Still, the pastrami on his Reuben should be a bit thicker. The rest of the traditional components are here — sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing, marbled rye (from Bagelworks, in this case) — but I’d also suggest putting the sandwich on a grill to make it exceptional.

Bonito Michoacan (1150 Minnesota Avenue, 913-371-0326), a grocery store, butcher shop and café, makes tacos to order, and you get hungrier by the second as you wait in line, watching carnitas sizzle on one flat-top grill and beefsteak on the other. I’ve tasted almost all of the 11 different variations on the taco theme here, and it’s hard to name a favorite. Today it’s the barbacoa (made with steamed beef cheek, lusciously tender). But I can’t rule out ordering another discada taco (imagine a tortilla wrapped around marinated beef, pork, bacon, hot dogs and ham) tomorrow.

This café and carnicería makes its presence known on weekends by the intoxicating fragrance of roasting chickens on the big outdoor grill in front of the building. The birds are beautifully golden, with just the slightest edge of crispness, and lushly juicy. It takes a great deal of self-control for me not to buy one before I even get inside the cafeteria-style dining area, where I’m determined to order a steaming bowl of menudo, the succulent pastor taco (flavored with chopped onion and pineapple), or the superb chilaquiles (drenched in tangy salsa verde).

The store shelves are worth investigating, too. This may be one of the few venues in town where you can walk out the door with laundry soap, a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexican pottery, a gilded piñata, and a styrofoam box filled with braised lamb stew.

Of course, it’s the tacos at El Camino Real (903 Seventh Street Parkway, 913-342-4333) that sent me into KCK in the first place, and the 15-year-old storefront café still brings it hard. The guacamole is made to order, the tortillas freshly grilled all day, the chunky pico de gallo still fiercely hot.

Tip big here, because these waitresses are never not in motion. They don’t just serve their customers — they wash dishes, grill tortillas, pack up takeout orders, make the guacamole, and ring up sales. There’s no ego here, and the food itself is appropriately humble — and absolutely delicious.

It’s also cheap enough that you might be tempted to order every last kind of taco. I have — at different times, mind you — and there’s not a loser in the bunch. Start with the grilled-fish tacos and the Rajas, which combines poblano pepper, queso and onion. Have just a couple and you’ll still have room for one of the seafood dishes — chilled shrimp cocktail, for sure, and the camarones a la Diabla, a devilish dish of prawns boiled in some intensely spicy chili concoction and served over rice.

And look, when I say hot and spicy about the stuff here, I mean it. The salsa in the squeeze bottles is addictive but positively nuclear. Put some on a tortilla chip and it detonates in your mouth.

In one working week, I visited these six family-owned restaurants and either discovered or remembered that each is well worth becoming a staple when you take a lunch break. Each reflects the diversity, talent and graciousness that have always made up the heart of downtown Kansas City, Kansas.

That’s what I’d call successful. And at least one of the proprietors I met defines success on similar terms.

“When we first opened the pizzeria in this neighborhood,” Brunetti Jr., of Nick’s Pizza, says, “we weren’t doing all that well. I wasn’t sure how successful we could ever be. But in the last few years, our business has really picked up quite a bit. Now I like this location a lot. It’s not making us rich, but I can’t complain.”