The Bolognese and the Beautiful

One of the things I love about television soap operas is the way they both stretch and compress time: Murder trials can last for months, fatal illnesses can be healed in days, marriages implode immediately, children completely bypass puberty on their way from toddler to twentysomething. That’s what I love about restaurant soap operas, too.

In the year since I reviewed Altizio’s (“Tease Me, Altizio’s,” June 5, 2003), there’s been plenty of drama. Frank Bushek, the man who founded the restaurant (and named it after his mother), was divorced from his wife and business partner, Terry Mason, last December, but not before expanding the tiny, 54-seat restaurant in November and butting heads with his extravagantly creative chef Mike Saluzzi the month before that. Saluzzi walked out, then Bushek either left or was forced out, depending on which version of the story you hear. What’s clear is that the original chef and founder are both out of the Altizio’s equation, and Mason is running the business. Her son, chef Josh Peterson, is in the kitchen, and investor-turned-co-owner Tom Williamson is helping in the front of the house.

This newer, bigger Altizio’s can seat 86 diners and is definitely prettier, with its arched brick entrances, twinkly Christmas lights and saffron-colored walls. The service is more attentive, and the menu is more extensive. And although it’s a fine-dining venue, the place also offers carry-out gourmet pizza, including a chicken Marsala version with a rich wine sauce.

Patrons can’t order it in the softly lighted dining room, though, because Altizio’s is not a pizza joint, Mason says. “Our customers want to come in and dine without a lot of children running around.”

What a daring admission for a restaurant owner to make, particularly in the middle of a Kansas suburb densely populated with young families. Even though Bushek is andato, Mason, Williamson and Peterson are maintaining his vision of a New York-style urban restaurant in a strip mall.

That’s all good in theory, but merely keeping up the concept isn’t enough. This restaurant’s distinctive identity was defined by Bushek’s blustery personality and Saluzzi’s flair in the kitchen, both of which are now sorely missing. Peterson has kept many of Saluzzi’s over-the-top creations on the menu, including fettuccine Cleopatra and lasagna Fantasia, but they’re prepared with a heavier hand. A kind of sloppiness now compromises the food, starting with the spelling errors on the menu. When did cioppino become choppino?

Peterson, though no novice in the kitchen, would have been wise to eliminate some of the more complicated dishes from the post-Saluzzi menu, such as the osso buco.

There’s no standard way of preparing the Italian dish of braised veal shanks; it has dozens of regional variations. My Sicilian grandmother simmered the shank with olive oil, onions, carrots, tomatoes, chicken stock, lemon zest and parsley, but it’s more frequently cooked in red wine or a heady combination of brandy and Marsala. The resulting dish should be tender and succulent, layered with the flavor of the meat juices, the vegetables and the wine.

“This is delicious veal,” said my friend, cookbook author Lou Jane Temple, after taking a bite from the hefty shank of meat in a jumble of cooked carrots and onions. “But it’s not osso buco. There are some recipes you can tinker with, but this isn’t one of them. This is as bland as pot roast.”

Sadly, I agreed. It was lovely meat, falling off the bone, but a very dull stew. This particular meal had started off on a disappointing note anyway. We’d ordered a plate of calamari served with what the menu described as a “spicy pear glaze.” The thick ropes of calamari were beautifully flash-fried, but I’m still not sure what the other sticky red concoction was — melted jelly, perhaps? I do know, however, that it wasn’t spicy and had no pear flavor.

Our toy-sized salads were equally blah. I absentmindedly picked through a drab Caesar, and Lou Jane bravely nibbled on a miniature “Mozzarella Caprese.” The menu claimed it was composed of “house-made mozzarella, fire-roasted peppers, garlic bulb and Roma tomatoes.” But the cheese didn’t look or taste like the soft, milky, homemade mozzarella that this restaurant used to serve; instead, it resembled the thin sheets of commercially prepared cheese one finds wrapped in plastic at the supermarket. It was like a strip of vinyl swimming in a soup of oil and balsamic vinegar. This wasn’t a salad; it was a culinary insult.

Here’s a word of advice to Peterson: If you’re going to continue serving a salad with this classic name, take a road trip to Columbia, Missouri, and see how Basque-born chef Peio Aramburu does it at Trattoria Strada Nova. It’s the real thing, bambino.

For dinner that night, I tackled one of Mike Saluzzi’s old conceits, lasagna Fantasia: hand-rolled pasta filled with crabmeat, seasoned bread crumbs and fresh herbs, topped with a shrimp-bisque reduction and garnished with caviar-coated goat cheese. The gimmicky dish was so full of decadently rich ingredients that after four or five bites, I was ready for a nap.

But Lou Jane wanted espresso and dessert, so our server brought out a tray crammed with squishy-looking display versions of the imported sweets. (“They’re all from New York companies,” she assured us.) There were four kinds of cheesecake, the ubiquitous tiramisu, and a chocolate-bourbon mousse wrapped in a candy ribbon. What caught Lou Jane’s attention was a three-layer mousse confection made with different types of chocolate. It was the best thing we tasted all night.

The next evening, I returned with Bob and Marilyn, who had loved Altizio’s during the Bushek-Saluzzi era. They gave thumbs up to the “Famous Sausage Bread” (although I vaguely remember portions being larger a year ago) and to a fat, steamed artichoke served upside down, piled with crabmeat and drowning in a creamy gorgonzola sauce. It takes a genius to figure out how to eat it, but once you master the puzzle it’s pretty fabulous.

“I love rich food,” Marilyn said as she nibbled daintily on an artichoke leaf, “especially when I’m not sure what the ingredients are.”

Unfortunately, the ingredients in other dishes were much too obvious — I cringed at the brassy sweetness of the house salad dressing. “It’s a honey-balsamic vinaigrette!” our waitress announced, reminding me of the scene in Auntie Mame when the title character tosses a honey-sweetened cocktail into the shrubbery. I was tempted to do the same.

I’d ordered a dinner with a wonderfully absurdist name — “reverse cannelloni.” But the actual dish — ricotta-filled cannelloni shells smothered in a meaty sirloin-and-shiitake sauce — had the taste and consistency of beef stroganoff. Bob’s chicken francese — a bowl of linguini with slivers of prosciutto topped with a gargantuan pounded chicken breast dipped in egg and sautéed in butter — turned out disturbingly rich and lemony. And Marilyn’s veal piccata cutlet, a little tough and chewy, came drenched in a milky lemon-caper sauce minus the lush tartness that the classic dish deserves.

It wasn’t just that the food was missing the spirited flavors of this restaurant’s previous incarnation. The serving staff, led by gracious Lori Elliott, couldn’t be more attentive or accommodating, but frankly, the dining room is missing its old vitality, too. How could things change so dramatically in just a year?

When a soap opera gets draggy, the show usually introduces a colorful new character or an intriguing plot twist. After a year of behind-the-scenes intrigue, it’s probably time Altizio’s did the same.