Tango Room

I know this nice couple in Leawood who not only bought into the suburban dream but also cranked it up a few notches. They purchased a 1960s-vintage ranch house on a big lot and then bulldozed the home. When the rubble was cleared away, they built a handsome mansion. This suburban renewal project was so successful that it inspired a couple of other homeowners to follow suit and tear down the two 1970s split-levels on either side of the mansion so they could build their own glamorous new manor homes.

I haven’t seen this happening much in the inner city yet, though a few 19th-century homes on the West Side have been razed to build sleek condo developments. A more interesting comparison might be made between the Leawood tear-down and an unassuming Southwest Boulevard restaurant once known as California Taqueria. What happened to California Taqueria wasn’t technically a demolition but might as well have been — the venue was drastically remodeled both inside and out, to the extent that it’s hard to remember what the old place looked like. On Southwest Boulevard, as in Leawood, the buildings were replaced by palatial quarters. In fact, Café Sevilla, the restaurant that replaced the old taqueria, was as large and attractive as a home in Hallbrook.

Inside what’s now a Moorish-meets-Disneyland structure at 700 Southwest Boulevard are polished wooden floors, built-in wine cabinets, two floors of dining space, a private banquet room, a strikingly attractive bar, and a stainless-steel kitchen that the legendary chef Jose “Don Pepe” Fernandez called the finest he had ever worked in.

After a triumphant opening in late 2005, Café Sevilla briefly closed a year later. Don Pepe had left the kitchen and taken his signature dishes with him. Gone were the paella, the grilled scallops in saffron cream sauce, the shrimp sautéed in garlic and olive oil. The owners decided to change the name of the place to Casa Grande and offer more traditional Mexican and Mexican-American fare.

The culinary shift made sense because the livelier (and noisier) La Bodega right across the Boulevard was serving a wider selection of the same kind of Spanish tapas that Don Pepe was offering. The biggest difference was that Café Sevilla seemed more formal than the casual, unpretentious La Bodega.

That illusion of formality has been dropped at Casa Grande, though the dining room retains the brick archways, the elegant light fixtures, the glass-topped tables and the red cloth napkins. A friend insists that the place looks like an upscale restaurant in Mexico City, even if the menu is, he grudgingly admits, comparable to every other Mexican restaurant on Southwest Boulevard.

“But,” he says, “I prefer Casa Grande because you never know when something unexpected is going to happen there.”

I wondered what the hell he meant by that.

I found out a few nights later, when Bob and Marilyn and I walked through the front door and right into the middle of a concert performed by a dozen or so musicians playing brass instruments. The bar and dining room were so packed that we couldn’t find a table, so we gave up and walked over to La Bodega. A couple of weeks later, I was back at Casa Grande, this time dining with Franklin and Trixie in a very quiet, nearly deserted dining room, when we noticed a nerdy-looking guy sitting near the front door fiddling with his laptop. “I think he’s downloading music,” Franklin whispered. Suddenly, sizzling Latin music echoed through the room, and a group of tango enthusiasts who’d been sitting at the bar hopped off their chairs and started dancing. On the dance floor, even the nerdy guy looked like Maksim Chmerkovskiy.

[page]

Suddenly, a familiar face appeared among the tango dancers: Jason Pollen, professor and chairman of the fiber department at the Kansas City Art Institute. He later confessed to me that he’s so passionate about the tango that he’s out swiveling his hips three or four nights a week. Casa Grande is his regular Wednesday night hangout.

“We have tango dancing one night a week and flamenco dancing every Friday,” our server informed us as she sat a plump vegetable quesadilla in front of us.

The brass band performs once a month, she added, or maybe not even that often. But entertainment is clearly an important element at Casa Grande. “This place is quite large, you see,” she said, waving her arm for emphasis.

Yes, the dining room is grande, but the menu isn’t all that fancy since Don Pepe’s departure. The shelves of the built-in wine cabinet, which was stocked with various vintages during the Café Sevilla period, is now heavy on bottles of tequila. But a cold margarita is probably better than a glass of Rioja for washing down a Tex-Mex creation like Fajitas Rancheras, anyway.

The appetizers aren’t sophisticated, either. I’m a fan of the punchy house salsa served with the chips, but I like cilantro. Those who loathe the pungent coriander leaves, beware! We saw a couple of alternatives to guacamole and bean dip, including four bacon-wrapped camarones Vallarta (shrimp that had spent a shade too long in the frying pan by the time they arrived at our table) and the ceviche, which several Pitch readers insist is as authentic as any they’ve had in Mexico.

But in true Midwestern fashion, the secret to Casa Grande’s success may be its steaks. In addition to the carne asada, the restaurant offers four other variations on a Kansas City strip, and none of them costs more than $15. The tender 12-ounce steak Jalisco comes blanketed in a smooth, subtle chipotle sauce and sided with sautéed cactus. I savored every bite. Meanwhile, Franklin commented that his burrito-and-enchilada combination plate was just the way he liked it: not too spicy.

Casa Grande’s owners understand something about Kansas Citians: We love Mexican food but we love familiar Mexican-American food even more. I have friends who fawn over the fajitas and frijoles at Casa Grande, but once you look past the pretty ambience, the food is comparable to most of its competition on the Boulevard. The exception here is the service. Casa Grande’s owners need to focus on training their servers in the art of thinking ahead. On all four of my visits, I had to request small plates; it never seemed to occur to the servers that anyone might want to share appetizers.

On the rainy night I dined with my friend Diane, we nibbled on camarones al mojo de ajo, which I enjoyed, even if the sautéed shrimp in the garlic butter weren’t much bigger than sea monkeys. Our server told us that the real specialty of the casa was the chile relleno. It turned out to be very light and good but not extraordinary.

Diane preferred sipping on a seductively potent Sangria and chatting, so I took up the slack, sampling a tempting tamale and surprisingly tender slices of carne asada, which I wrapped in soft corn tortillas and dipped into a heap of pico de gallo.

We waited for some dancers to start kicking up their legs, but that night we saw no such action. Instead, the highlight of the meal was a large, very satiny flan drenched in a dark-amber caramel sauce. With that, Diane finally discovered her appetite and lustily spooned up the custard. Once again, something unexpected had happened.

[page]