The Edge of Life

One thing I’ve learned doing this job is that dining in a restaurant is a unique form of theater that requires no ticket or applause. It’s actually a more theatrical experience working in a restaurant, because there’s often excessive drama behind the scenes, back in the kitchen: chefs throwing temper tantrums (and sometimes pots), dishwashers stumbling to work drunk, servers squabbling, managers in starched outfits acting like stuffed shirts.

As a dining customer, there’s less drama to observe but often a heightened sense of absurdity. That can sometimes be disastrous, because a little unintentional comedy can go a long, long way; I don’t care how funny Jerry Lewis was playing an incompetent waiter in the movies — in real life it’s amusing only for the first few minutes.

A tiny bit of absurdity, like a pinch of nutmeg in custard, is a good thing. That’s one of the reasons I can’t help liking the six-month-old Grace, a Bistro on the Edge, which has more eccentricities than just about any other restaurant in midtown. I’ve experienced certain moments sitting in that mauve dining room when I’ve been tempted to look around for a hidden camera. Is this a real restaurant or a reality show?

Take the restaurant’s only waiter, for example. I’ve been told there are other servers, but throughout five visits to the place, Jess is the only person I’ve ever seen working the room. He’s very congenial, but usually looks so food-splattered and disheveled that I’ve wondered whether he starts his shifts rolling around on the kitchen floor. Admittedly, it can’t be easy taking care of 14 tables, and to his credit, Jess is unflappable. Unpolished, but unflappable.

That’s because he has higher aspirations than merely hustling food. “We’re losing Jess soon,” restaurant co-owner Mike McLaughlin recently told me. “He’s moving to Florida to become a movie star.”

Florida, huh? I never would have pegged Jess as a potential movie star, but then again, I can’t quite see him as a waiter, either. Hey, but diners need to view Grace, a Bistro on the Edge from a unique perspective — it isn’t a traditional restaurant any more than, say, Late Nite Theatre is like the Kansas City Rep.

When they named their restaurant, owners Mike and Lisa McLaughlin had no idea that Grace was literally on the edge — of Kansas City’s unfortunate racial dividing line. The building faces Troost, the historic boundary between white Kansas City on the west and black on the east. The McLaughlins — an interracial couple — knew nothing of this when they purchased the building near the corner of 70th Street two years ago and started renovating it. “I saw that it was on a busy street with lots of traffic, and it was close to our home,” Mike says. The bistro is named after Lisa’s late mother, a former Kansas City schoolteacher “who was on the edge,” Mike tells me, without really explaining why.

The restaurant attracts an interesting mix of customers of all colors, shapes and sizes, reflecting the diversity of the immediate neighborhood. And those neighbors have loyally supported the place, even as McLaughlin works out all kinds of new-restaurant kinks.

In fact, the McLaughlins are so nice and friendly that you can’t help but want them to succeed, even as you’re questioning their sanity. Lisa is busy doing her residency in pathology at KU Med Center, and Mike hasn’t been in the restaurant business since he owned a small bistro in Omaha, Nebraska, in the 1970s. He later went into government work, becoming the finance administrator in that state’s Douglas County.

Their place is a jumble of unconventional ideas: mismatched chairs, vinyl tablecloths, paper napkins, les fruit crepes and bacon cheeseburgers. Music is played on a portable CD player at the back of the dining room. Sometimes it’s Ella Fitzgerald, sometimes Sinatra singing the most melancholy ballads. Once it was the theme from Gone With the Wind. But there’s something so incredibly likable about the place that even a cynic like me was willing to overlook a lot of little things that normally would drive me to distraction.

The kitchen was wildly inconsistent during the first couple of months, but things have improved dramatically since McLaughlin hired chef Colin Fuehrer in March.

Fuehrer’s culinary skills are most evident in the lunch-dinner menu and less steady with the breakfast fare. I have eaten some decent morning meals — which are hearty and cheap — but Fuehrer needs to revise his pancake recipe (they’re too thick, too doughy and undercooked) and take a less inventive approach to the biscuits-and-gravy concept, which smothers nice big biscuits and two fried sausage patties with bland cream gravy. Call me a square, but I’d rather have seasoned gravy with the sausage mixed in it.

Another morning, I wondered whether the oeuvres à la Florentine et jambon would live up to its Gallic pretensions — and it did. I enjoyed two paper-thin crêpes wrapped around scrambled eggs, spinach and ham and drizzled with a delicate dill sauce. But it would have been nice if the accompanying English muffin had been toasted. Or even warm. I haven’t tried the les fruits fraiches toast, but I love the description: “In a French home you are likely to have fresh fruit over a baked item.” Remind me to ask Audrey Tautou if that’s true when she makes a movie with Jess … in Florida.

The lunch and dinner fare includes burgers (“A char-broiled delight that will bring you back for another,” brags the menu), along with steaks, salmon and several pasta dishes.

One night when I dined with Bob and Carol, the artfully splattered Jess informed us that the appetizer du jour was “something that looks like a pizza but isn’t.” It was an apt description for a puffy pita round topped with molten brie and sun-dried tomatoes.

It was tasty but not extraordinary the way that night’s $10 dinner special was: two breaded and sautéed tilapia fillets topped with a hot cranberry-and-pomegranate compote. It was excellent, and Carol couldn’t believe the price. Ditto for Bob’s gorgonzola-topped Kansas City strip, which wasn’t the most tender slab of beef I’d ever tasted but was juicy and flavorful for a bargain cut.

I had one of the Alfredo dishes, all of which are named for “the renowned Lindsey Stennis,” who is so famous that I’ve never heard of her. “She’s a young girl who aspires to be great someday,” McLaughlin told me solemnly, “and she likes her sauces a certain way.” Well, so do I, and damn it, I’m still living in obscurity. But I practically inhaled the Steak Gorgonzola Lindsey, linguine topped with slices of beef tenderloin, all of it swimming in Lindsey’s extremely rich and thick Alfredo sauce.

A raucous table of middle-aged Brooksiders was sitting behind us, laughing with such abandon, I had to look twice to make sure they weren’t boozing it up — Grace doesn’t serve hooch; it’s still without a liquor license — but they were evidently enjoying a show of their own, stone-cold sober.

We got our finale long before that lively party did, but dessert turned out to be anticlimactic. The flourless chocolate torte made with chocolate and chopped nuts was dense and jarringly sugary. McLaughlin’s own invention, a pastry “rose” dipped in melted Russell Stover chocolates, looked pretty but didn’t have that freshly baked quality that even an upscale cupcake requires.

But even with all of its imperfections, something keeps luring me back to Grace, a Bistro on the Edge. The food has improved with each visit, the prices are appealing, and the McLaughlins couldn’t be more charming. And Jess, bless his heart, may be on the brink of future renown as a movie star. I mean, when you’re on the edge, anything can happen.