Pain and Pleasure

Marilyn raved about the Parmesan-crusted tilapia (so did I), and Sidonie kindly offered me a tender hunk of her pot roast, which was served in a little covered china pot and was quite possibly the best in the city. I don't know what possessed me to order a big ol' hunk of beef, "Old KC Rib Eye Steak," after all those tater tots, but it was peppery and luscious. Bob's dry-aged Kansas City strip was excellent, certainly comparable in quality to any other Plaza steak palace.

But the real stars at M&S Grill are the desserts. We're not just talking visually pretty. They're gigantic, too. The oversized slices of cake and pie are reminiscent of baked goods from a 1940s steakhouse. This includes the biggest slab of red velvet cake I've ever seen. The traditional version is made with a couple of tablespoons of cocoa, but I couldn't taste any in the layers of dark-red sponge cake here, thickly iced with cream-cheese frosting. A server told me that it was the same sponge-cake recipe used for the excellent Boston cream pie (vastly superior to the velvet cake, by the way). Still, when was the last time you saw red velvet cake or Boston cream pie on a modern dessert tray?

Instead of the ubiquitous crème brûlée and tiramisu, executive chef Nathan Holm has pushed for vintage desserts, including a walnut-and-caramel "Upside-Down Apple Pie" (fabulous!) and a hot-fudge sundae (in this case, a martini glass piled with vanilla-bean ice cream, warm Kahlua fudge sauce, and three golf ball-sized homemade truffles). Sidonie, sadistically, denied me a truffle; I was tempted to bite her finger instead.

I bit my tongue on my next visit, this time with Bob and Darren. Instead of overindulging, I decided to take a more moderate approach. We shared the seared pork tenderloin appetizer, a big tray of paper-thin slices that we swirled in sweet teriyaki and bland "hot" mustard sauce. Darren's stuffed salmon, crammed with shrimp, crabmeat and bubbly Brie, was almost too decadent to finish. Bob manhandled the succulent stuffed chicken breast, implanted with shrimp, artichoke and sun-dried tomatoes.

Wanting to sample one of the six pasta choices, I settled on steak and wild-mushroom fettuccine, which looked and tasted like old-fashioned beef stroganoff, but really, really good beef stroganoff. (It's made with veal stock and red wine -- better than mama's but it evokes the same nostalgia.)

Still, I was tickled to find that it's one of a handful of favorite dishes from the past that get first-class treatment at M&S Grill, along with a fine Cobb salad, the pot roast and fried shrimp, and marionberry pie (the only dessert not made in this restaurant's kitchen). Back when Kansas City had a thriving, vital downtown, these were the kinds of dishes that diners might have found at restaurants like Bretton's or the Westport Room, proving, as Peter Allen once sang, that everything old is new again.