Uberdine to serve its first brunch on May 25

Chef Joe Shirley isn’t ready for his real restaurant yet – he and his wife, Carolina, want to wait until their only child, a sixth-grader, goes to high school – but his nine-month-old pop-up dining concept, Uberdine (which The Pitch named “Best Restaurant Experiment” in last year’s Best of Kansas City issue), is giving the young chef the opportunity to keep his day job as the executive chef for a major financial institution and express his culinary creativity on his own terms.

Since launching Uberdine last July, Shirley has mounted four very different dinners in unique locations, including a coffee-inspired meal at the Roasterie and a Japanese-style meal at the Filling Station coffeehouse in midtown. Uberdine’s first brunch is to be held Sunday, May 25, at the Farm to Market Bread Co.’s headquarters at 20th Street and Walnut. Tickets are still left for the brunch, which has two seatings (at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; for prices and reservations, visit the Uberdine website here).

The eight-course brunch will, like the previous four Uberdine events, be a showcase for Shirley’s creativity: one of the courses is described on Shirley’s menu for the event as “Mac and Cheese”: truffle, cheddar, explosion.

Explosion? 
“Yes, It’s really like eating macaroni and cheese tucked into a ravioli,” Shirley says. “It explodes in your mouth.”

The scallop course, a plump pan-seared scallop on Farm to Market brioche, is topped with a fried quail egg and dusted with bacon powder. That’s right, bacon powder, not baking powder (although it looks suspiciously white in the photo).

“We use a fat-absorbing tapioca-based powder and mix it with warm pork-belly fat,” Shirley says.

Shirley will also be the featured chef at the Powell Gardens Missouri Barn Dinner on Sunday, June 22.