Restaurants

Lost in the translation

At Carrabba's Italian Grill, diners will get good food but mixed messages.

By Charles Ferruzza 

At the risk of sounding like a character in the movie Cool Hand Luke, let me say that when it comes to dinner at the new Carrabba's Italian Grill in Overland Park, there's definitely "a failure to communicate."

What do I mean? The staff at this slickly operated, Texas-based chain restaurant (operated by parent company Outback Steakhouses Inc.) could use a little extra training when it comes to answering even the simplest questions.

It started the minute I walked in for my second dinner in the place. The roof of this newly built, freestanding building (constructed on the site of a tired old Chi-Chi's restaurant) is cleverly planted -- like the terrace roofs of Babylon's legendary hanging gardens -- with an assortment of shrubs, junipers, leafy little trees, and perennial plants. It's an unexpectedly beautiful exterior in the middle of this dullsville suburban shopping strip, and I was nearly caught off guard when my friend Bob asked the hostess guiding us to our table whether the greenery on the roof was real. To anyone who has ever yanked weeds in a garden, those shrubs and trees are obviously real.

That's why I laughed when the hostess, an apple-cheeked young woman, said, "No, they're fake."

Surely she was kidding, I thought, looking for a trace of a mischievous gleam in her eyes. But no, she was absolutely serious. "They're fake," she insisted, plopping down two menus on the plastic-topped table and scurrying back to her hostess station.

We sat in shocked silence until our waiter arrived and we asked him the same question. "Oh, no, that stuff's all real," he said. "There's a sprinkler system up there to keep everything watered." It would be the last question of the night he would answer with any confidence, but there it was. Later, when one of the managers walked by, I flagged her down to ask the first of many questions during that dinner.

"Who told you the plantings weren't real?" she asked, almost incredulously. When we tattled on the hostess, she simply shrugged as if our answer was expected. "I'll have to talk to her," she sighed.

There are plenty of staff members at Carrabba's -- named for one of the chain's two Italian-American founders, Johnny Carrabba (who opened his first namesake restaurant with partner Damian Mandola in 1986) -- with whom I'd like to have a talk, starting with that night's server, who was eager but awkward, and deserves points for his inventiveness, if not his serving skills.

Looking at the restaurant's appetizer list, I read that the plate of sausage and peppers ($6.49) offered "handmade Italian fennel sausage." Where, I asked our waiter, is the sausage actually made?

"Made?" he gasped. "Oh, where is it made? There's, uh, a really interesting story about that. It's, well, made on a little island off the coast of Italy."

Oh, really, I thought, imported all the way from Italy? As I narrowed my eyebrows at his "really interesting story," the waiter abruptly stopped his monologue. "Maybe I better find out more about it."

And off he ran, returning quickly with a basket of warm, yeasty bread (actually baked in the Carrabba's kitchen) and a plate of chopped peppers and herbs, which he doused with a splash of olive oil. "You can dip your bread in this," he explained. "And I found out about the sausage; it's from Texas, made from an old Carrabba family recipe." And he vanished again.

"Poor kid," said Bob, dipping a wedge of bread into the oil. "It's probably his first night on the floor and you're torturing him."

Torture? I reminded him that torture was the years I worked as a waiter for a certain huge national restaurant chain that demanded, in addition to a perpetually perky attitude (which finally did me in), an encyclopedic knowledge of its large menu; we were frequently tested on the ingredients of every single dish. It was grueling, but I can still name them, two decades later.

On a previous visit, our perpetually perky waitress had been a much quicker study. If I asked any question she couldn't answer, she dragged over a manager or another server to answer for her, like a kindly camp counselor. And when she accidentally brought me a plate of Speidino Di Mare (grilled shrimp and sea scallops; $14.99) with a mound of pasta in the slightly spicy tomato-and-basil sauce instead of the fettuccine Alfredo that I had ordered, she rushed back to the kitchen and the manager returned, in seconds, with another plate of fettuccine, this time drenched in butter, cheese, and cream. "She's so sorry," he clucked, in a fatherly fashion.

At Carrabba's, the servers are young, peppy, and energetic. They need to be, in the frenetic environment of this bustling dining room, with its tile floors, mauve stucco walls, and faux arbors, all leafy and covered with tendrils of grapevines that are clearly of the no-nonsense fake variety. On a busy night, even during the weekdays, this place fills up quickly and the staff members working the hostess station often stand right outside the front door (where the handle is painted to look like a chianti bottle) holding clipboards and passing out beepers; the wait can be as long as an hour on the weekends.

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