Review: Tavernonna seeks to transcend the trappings of the hotel restaurant
It’s a bit of a cliché, the underperforming hotel restaurant, but it’s endured for good reason. Consider the challenges facing hotel chefs: the marathon hours, the high customer volume, the pressure to offer something to please every necktie with a breakfast voucher.
Never mind the problem of motivation. Each traveling circus or T-Swift tour means a revolving door of new guests with new palates. The burden to court local, repeat customers is low.
The Hotel Phillips is battling that image with Tavernonna, its year-old anchor restaurant. It is gaining ground. Sure, the Chicago-based restaurant group DMK has skewed conservative with its vision of a modern Italian trattoria, and some miscues suggest coordination problems with back-of-house staff. But splashes of creativity hint at a brighter future for the location, where the cocktails are novel, the pastas are comforting, and nearly every dish is snowed with a conciliatory layer of Grana Padano.
Brunch is served from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekends, and it’s an economical way to sample executive chef Bryant Wigger’s Italian comfort food. Leave the short-order standards to the hotel’s guests and ask for the fried chicken and biscuits. Wigger’s fried chicken is excellent — it won him the Golden Fork at last year’s Taste of Kansas City competition—and the breading on the dish I sampled stayed crisp beneath a heavy coating of spicy Italian sausage gravy and molten egg yolks. The biscuit was buttery and crisp, if a bit dense, and a piquant red pepper sauce brightened up the rich flavors. (Gold star to the server who immediately noticed that the dish hit the table without that pepper sauce and corrected the error.)
The sandwiches at that meal were less balanced. My server praised the rosemary chicken sandwich, but it arrived on a vulture-sized ciabatta that had been toasted to a Herculean chew. The bun overpowered the pancetta, the mozzarella, the rapini pesto — and my puny human jaw. The French dip suffered from a similar problem; though its bun was more tender, it dwarfed the flavors of the (very good) shaved steak and horseradish cream. Another quibble is that the sandwich arrived sans jus, and neither the kitchen nor our server noticed the omission. But the Tuscan fries served alongside smoothed things over. The spuds were light and crisp, tossed with garlic and rosemary and mossed with salty cheese.
Those fries showed up again with the Tavern burger, a remarkable feat of chargrilled engineering. I’m incessantly railing, in the old-man-yells-at-cloud tradition, against Big Beautiful Burgers stuffed into wispy buns that leave nothing to the imagination. But Wigger has the beef-to-bun ratio nailed to the third decimal place: behold the modestly plump round of Hatfield Farms ground beef flanked by a soft, shiny-domed bun strong enough to withstand the condiments (aged cheddar, smoky bacon, balsamic-glazed onions) without overwhelming them. My patty arrived a hair too charred—more bitter than juicy—and yet I’d order it again on measurements alone.
The dinner menu is approachable and unfussy, with flavors that seem at times calibrated to an outsider’s idea of a Midwesterner’s palate (salt, fat, cheese). No one here will roll their eyes if you order a plate of spaghetti — pomodoro, cacio e pepe, or all’amatriciana, all satisfying and satisfactory. The rigatoni Bolognese I tried on a recent visit was a rock-solid read on a classic. The housemade rigatoni was firm and chewy, the ideal foil for glossy morsels of braised beef. The gravy was rich and savory (if a bit soup-y), with a crucial drizzle of an extra-fruity olive oil to freshen the flavors.
But when Wigger gets weird with it, diners win. The baked ziti hummed with bolder, more complex flavors thanks to hunks of roasted red peppers, smears of smoky eggplant, and thin ribbons of grassy pesto festooned over the top like tinsel. The noodles were cooked a minute too long in the version I tried (the ziti is the only pasta Wigger doesn’t make), but the flavors were so bright — and the mozzarella so silky — that I didn’t much care.
I was eager to revisit the ricotta cavatelli, a dish I’d sampled at the restaurant some months ago that made me pine for a Bryant Wigger baseball card. Imagine delicate, ricotta-lined dumplings bathed in brown butter and nestled in a creamy lake of fontina fonduta, the whole plate trimmed Christmas-green with the gently curled husks of Brussels sprouts. But a recent visit made me wonder if I’d embellished that memory. The same plate arrived a dull brown, the colors muddy and the flavors muddled.
With a hotel’s punishing hours and service schedules, consistency can be a challenge — especially when it comes to finicky flavors and time-consuming plating. But the creative touches on a few of Tavernonna’s dishes demonstrate how those risks can yield returns. A pompom of fresh fennel proved an ideal complement for a crisp-skinned branzino swimming in a garlicky white wine and tomato brodo. Chunky pickled vegetables likewise leavened a potentially heavy chicken “Parm” (Wigger uses caciocavallo cheese in lieu of Parmesan) with a jolt of acid. And a skull cap of tangy lemon ricotta was the perfect crown for “nonna’s meatballs,” appetite-teasing rounds of dense-but-springy brisket swathed in a velvety pomodoro sauce.
Side dishes here are à la carte, but a handful are worth the expense. Skip the cheesy polenta, which was well-textured but bland. I preferred the grilled escarole, which came soused in a tangy vinaigrette. The lake of dribbly vinaigrette made the dish (and my chin) look sloppy, but a blush of heat from ‘nduja sausage banished any impulse to propriety. But my hands-down favorite was a dish of Brussels sprouts with a painter’s feel for composition: a salty funk from grana Padano, a rich nuttiness from brown butter, a slight crunch from slivered almonds, and a sweet undercurrent from caramelized sugars. This is a vegetable worth sharing as a starter (along with those meatballs)
Cocktails are another high point, giving you good reason to drink your dessert. Cold weather begs for brandy, and Tavernonna’s seasonal offerings are crafted with the care of year-round classics. The Refreshing Holiday lived up to its name, combining apple brandy (allegedly “bacon-fat-washed,” though those notes escaped detection) with cinnamon syrup, a housemade cinnamon and pear purée, and a creamy head of egg-white foam stippled with nutmeg. The drink was complex but balanced, with warm undertones of spiced cider and a smooth finish that belied the booze.
The silver medal went to the cognac flip, which blended Hennessy VSOP and cream with a housemade orgeat (an almond syrup) infused with espresso and toasted hazelnut. The drink tasted like a melted milkshake — a little sweet for my taste, with a custardy finish from the egg yolk that the intervening flavors couldn’t quite overcome. Still, it was a sneakily sippable drink.
The drinks and small plates at Tavernonna are strong enough to shrug off that hotel-food reputation. A few imaginative touches show Chef Wigger’s feel for balanced flavors and bold ingredients. But for the restaurant to bring in more than its keycard clientele, it may need to grapple with an overall tendency to play (and plate) it safe.
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Tavernonna
106 W 12th St
816-346-4410
Hours
Breakfast: Monday–Friday, 6:30 a.m.–10:30 a.m.
Brunch: Saturday and Sunday 6:30 a.m.–2 p.m.
Lunch: Monday–Friday 11 a.m.–2 p.m.
Dinner: Sunday–Thursday 5 p.m.–10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 5 p.m.–11 p.m.
Prices
Appetizers: $4–16
Pastas: $12–18
Entrees: $16–43
Cocktails: $11–13
Best bet: Buck convention and order the Brussels sprouts as an appetizer. Dinner’s the baked ziti, with a Refreshing Holiday for “dessert.”
