Uberdine re-creates a school lunch tray, the chef Joe Shirley way

It has been at least 24 years since local chef Joe Shirley — the founder of the Uberdine series of pop-up restaurant events — last ate a school lunch at Horace Mann Elementary School in his hometown of Springfield, Missouri. But he has never quite forgotten the experience — or his favorite things on the heavy plastic lunch tray.

“My favorite days were the ones where the kitchen served a nice homemade cinnamon roll with chili,” says Shirley. “And the cinnamon roll was just barely touching the chili, giving a slight chili note to the sweet roll.”

Shirley created his version of that roll for the Uberdine event he titled “School Days” last Saturday at the St. James Place Community Kitchen — a nonprofit organization at 3934 Troost — that serves as many as 250 free meals five nights a week to patrons, many of them homeless. The “School Days” event raised enough funds for St. James Place to pay for at least one night of meals for the men, women and children who patronize the facility.
“I found out about St. James Place,” Shirley says, “when I received an e-mail, completely out of the blue, from the director of the facility, Doug Langer, offering the venue as a place to do one of our events. When I toured the facility and saw how much they do for the community, I knew that I wanted to be part of it in some way.”

“One of my co-workers had heard about the Uberdine dinners — we talk a lot about food here — and we thought that by hosting one of his events here, we could offer a chance for people who had no idea what we were doing at St. James Place to learn more about us,” Doug Langer says.

Last Saturday’s event attracted 47 patrons, paying over $100 a ticket, to dine in the modest dining hall — the red-brick building at 39th Street and Troost was originally constructed to serve as the gymnasium for the former St. James Catholic school, which was razed in 1976 — during two seatings.

Shirley’s take on the cinnamon roll-and-chili combination (which was one of 14 courses served over two-and-a-half hours) was a yeasty little roll made with both cinnamon and ancho chili and “frosted” with an ancho-chili cream cheese. Shirley’s childhood memories of his school lunches also included the segmented plastic trays that often featured the dishes he remembered best: tuna casserole, a fried chicken patty, cubes of Jell-O, a medley of mixed vegetables, bread and butter, and those greasy squares of homemade pizza.

For “School Days,” Shirley did his own imaginative versions of all of those dishes. His “Jello,” for example, was an amber disc of peach champagne gelee. Shirley’s version of tuna casserole was a square of raw tuna speared on the tines of a fork with a crispy rice puff that he made from cooked, dehydrated and fried rice paste. A “pizza” was a square of flatbread topped with a lardo (a fancier term for fatback) of Kobe beef and a pepperoncini vinaigrette. The favorite item on this lunch tray was Shirley’s spin on bread and butter: “I made my own loaf of white bread and topped it with a compote of truffle butter, artichokes, and chopped truffles,” Shirley says.

Other childhood favorites served during the meal were Shirley’s sophisticated variations on Salisbury steak, country fried steak, spaghetti, and chocolate pudding.

Shirley, who serves as executive chef for a major bank in downtown Kansas City, says he’s going to reduce the number of Uberdine events he hosts each year by at least half.

“I may do two or three a year instead of six,” Shirley says. “I love doing them and they’re really cool, but I do everything myself — all the delivery, all the prep work, most of the cooking — and it’s a big investment of time, and I still lose money on all of them. As my private dinners and catering picks up, I have to cut down on Uberdine.”

The last Uberdine event for 2014 will be a dinner at the Roasterie in early November, Shirley says. “But I still plan to host a fundraising dinner for St. James Place this year,” he says. “And maybe a dinner for the people who actually eat at the facility every day. My wife, Carolina, and I want to be volunteers for them. It’s an important asset for Kansas City.”