The Missouri Mud Company offers cause for gyro worship
I know that serving a gyro sandwich does not make a restaurant a Greek restaurant. But I realized that in Raymore, where I passed a Waffle House, a Ryan’s, a Culver’s and a Dairy Queen on my way to the Missouri Mud Company, just having some feta cheese in the kitchen set this little family-owned deli and coffeehouse apart from any other dining spot in its community.
I never would have heard of the Missouri Mud Company if my friend Andrew, who works in downtown Kansas City but lives in Raymore, hadn’t told me that he thinks the food there is quite good. The name of the joint put me off immediately. After all, I’ve been served coffee in local restaurants that has tasted like mud. Have I ever tasted mud? Yes, but that’s another story.
“So tell me again,” groused my friend Truman as we drove south on U.S. Highway 71, “why we have to go to Raymore to eat some pita bread.”
Truman would have been perfectly content to have stopped for lunch at the Waffle House. But I kept going because, since my recent review of Tasso’s, I wanted to see if there was another Greek restaurant in the metro. The quick answer: sort of.
The Missouri Mud Company is a little storefront operated by Tina Alyea and various family members, including her sister, Trish; Trish’s daughter, Ashley; and the Greek-born family patriarch, Lou Giannios, who arrives in the afternoon to chat with customers and occasionally burst into song. He sang “Happy Birthday” to one table in the long, narrow dining room on my first visit, with Truman, Andrew and Andrew’s wife, Kelly, but later told us that he has a more varied repertoire.
“It’s just like Zorba the Greek,” whispered Truman, who was delighted by every eccentricity about the place. I don’t think there’s one inch of wall space that hasn’t been adorned with a piece of art, a geegaw or some bric-a-brac — all for sale, of course. There’s no rhyme or reason to the arrangement of this display, which explains why a tasteful little framed icon of the Virgin Mary and child hangs directly beneath a sign in which cutout letters spell Tiki Bar.
There are crosses and crucifixes, painted flowers, wholesome platitudes and the occasional sly shot. Andrew’s favorite sign read, “Guests Bring Happiness. Some By Coming, Some By Going.”
“Do you think that refers to some of the restaurant guests?” he asked me.
“Wait until I pay the bill,” I answered.
I needed a cup of java right away. Customers order at the counter, where there’s a stack of house-baked desserts neatly arranged in clear plastic boxes. I knew right away that I was getting on Ashley’s nerves by asking too many questions, especially about the pastries. She gave me a wary look that I remembered all too well from the one summer that I worked in a small Indiana hamlet that had two bookstores — a Christian bookshop and an X-rated newsstand — and that treated outsiders as if they had stumbled into Stephen King’s Children of the Corn.
But I pressed on, discovering that the desserts included a brown sugar cake, brownies, baklava and something called pumpkin pie cake. Andrew and Kelly ordered gyro sandwiches, which pretty much encompasses all of the Greek cuisine served here, unless you count a couple of Mediterranean-inspired breakfast dishes and two versions of Greek salad. Truman ordered the Crabby Greek Salad. “Do you think it’s made with real crabmeat?” he asked. For $5.50? I didn’t think so.
Just to be sure, though, I asked, and Ashley’s eyes narrowed. “It’s imitation crab,” she said without looking up from the ticket she was writing. Luckily, Truman is a fan of imitation crabmeat and loved the salad — a jumble of iceberg lettuce, feta cheese and that crablike substance, in Greek dressing. “Don’t you want a bite?” he asked, pushing his plate (a Styrofoam box, actually) in my direction. No, I explained, there were some culinary creations that I could live without sampling, and Crabby Greek Salad was one of them.
Besides, I was too busy considering how much guts it takes to claim, as Missouri Mud’s menu does, “the best Reuben in KC.” I decided that it took even more guts to keep it on the menu because the sandwich wouldn’t even make my top 40. The corned beef was so dry, I thought for a minute that it had been made with beef jerky. The side dish, a little Styrofoam cup of pasta salad, was excellent, but I detest eating with plastic forks. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and better for the environment to just wash metal flatware? I blurted this out, not realizing that Ashley was peering over at our table from behind a display of Torani syrups.
“Children of the Corn,” Truman hissed as a warning.
Andrew and Kelly, meanwhile, had ordered gyro sandwiches that looked beautiful, with wonderfully creamy dill tzatziki sauce. I finally understood why the sandwich is this shop’s calling card. Tina Alyea uses the best pita bread I’ve tasted in a long time — it was well worth the drive, no matter how much Truman had complained.
We proceeded to share an order of the excellent baklava. The pumpkin pie cake, however, tasted like a prize recipe from a Pillsbury Bake-Off: spicy and sweet with a crunchy topping. I’d make one in the unlikely event that I ever got invited to a church potluck.
I returned for breakfast a few days later with Carol Ann and Truman, who insisted on going again because he wanted to taste a Greek omelet with gyro meat. He thought it sounded like a combination of “Athens and Waffle House.” That’s a good description, although he and Carol Ann raved about the four-egg creation folded over feta cheese, onions and tomatoes, served with a dollop of the tzatziki and four wedges of grilled pita.
It was a lovely, satisfying dish. I wished I had ordered it, but I’d gone for the stuffed breakfast pita, loaded with scrambled eggs, spicy sausage, onions and mushrooms and blanketed, unfortunately, with molten American cheese. I considered scraping it off, but that processed cheese food might as well be glue.
We enjoyed the fine house-made breakfast pastries, such as a hefty cappuccino fudge muffin that Carol Ann loved, and fudgy chocolate brownies that were nearly as big as paperbacks — better than doughnuts but maybe not so good with a stuffed breakfast pita because I truly was stuffed by the time we rolled out of there.
Carol Ann and Truman thought the Missouri Mud Company was fabulous, fun and adorable. They loved chatting with Trish and Ashley, were fans of the 1960s music playing over the sound system, and couldn’t stop talking about the pastries.
“And what did you think?” they asked me.
“It was sweet,” I replied. If I said anything more, my name would be mud.
