BEST
HAPPY HOUR: Mon-Fri 3-6
FOOD
FRANK JAMES
SALOON
MOS
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IDAY S
PARKVILLE’S BEST NEW SALOON! KARAOKE 6-10 eVERY SUNDAY
10919 NW 45 Hwy. Parkville, MO
Lunch Buffet, Salad Bar Daily Food & Drink Specials
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BEST OF KANSAS CITY 2012
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ABC Café 10001 West 87th Street, Overland Park | 913-859-0089
BEST COMEBACK STORY Café Italia 160 English Landing Drive, Parkville 816-584-0607 | cafeitalia2.com
For nearly two decades, childhood friends Guy Tamburello and Paul Anselmo operated an Italian restaurant, Café Italia, on North Oak Trafficway. It wasn’t a fancy trattoria but an unassuming, family-style dining room serving generous dinners of pasta, veal, chicken and seafood with hot bread and cold salads. The surrounding neighbors loved the place, but the area changed. Metro North Mall closed. Longtime residents moved. Tamburello and Anselmo received an offer to sell the building in 2010, and they closed shop and took different career paths. But this year, the business partners were encouraged to take over a vacant Japanese steakhouse in Parkville. Believing that Parkville was ready for their kind of Italian — rich Northern Italian dishes, hearty Sicilian meals — the two entrepreneurs opened a new Café Italia, a vast improvement on the original in every way, including an exhibition kitchenette in the dining room where miniature loaves of bread are baked, fresh pasta is prepared, and Tamburello’s gelato machine seems in perpetual motion. Sometimes the second act is better.
Queen Lizzy ’s Fish and Chips
THE PITCH
BEST LATE-NIGHT MENU
slices, a Thai chili paste and dried red-chili flakes) virtually guaranteed to get you hot and bothered. For dessert, there’s the best coconut cake in the city. Coconut water is a proven aphrodisiac, so the milk and flakes used in this moist, heavenly layer cake should logically lead to a stimulating finale.
BEST FISH AND CHIPS
44
KC 201 2
ANGELA C. BOND
We Deliver!
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The staples of late-night dining in the metro — we’re talking about a sit-down meal after 11 p.m. — have never been exotic. Diners serve breakfasts and burgers. A few family-owned taquerias serve post-prime-time tacos and burritos. But at ABC Café, a tiny dining room in a forgettable suburban strip center, husbandand-wife restaurateurs Cindy Cheung and Jackie Lee offer Cantonese cuisine from noon until midnight Wednesday through Monday. Customers are seated right up until midnight and can order inexpensive dim-sum plates (curried beef puffs, vegetable spring rolls and many other delicacies), fragrant soups and bubbling hot pots, cold Cantonese favorites (the hot and spicy beef tendon is delicious) and steamed pigs feet. The clientele is mostly Chinese after 10 p.m., so you’ll feel as if you’ve stumbled into something so special, you won’t want to tell anyone about it.
BEST EXPENSE-ACCOUNT DINNER
125 East 10th Street, Lawrence
The Majestic Restaurant
785-856-5570 | queenlizzys.com
931 Broadway | 816-221-1888 | majestickc.com
Battered, fried fish and deep-fried potatoes are traditional English eats, so it makes sense that a British-born restaurateur would know the secret to the very best fish and chips in the Midwest. Not long after Surrey native Matt Poulton moved to Lawrence, he decided that the college town simply had to have “a proper fish-and-chip shop.” A year ago, he launched Queen Lizzy’s, just off Massachusetts. Poulton batters his generous hunks of cod in a mixture of egg, flour and Foster’s Southwick Ale and hand-cuts and brines his potatoes before frying. “It’s not a real fish-and-chip shop,” KCUR 89.3’s Kim Noble says, “unless there are mushy peas.” Well, Poulton does have mushy peas (as well as sausage rolls, sliders and battered chicken strips). Case closed.
Frank Sebree’s historic and haunted downtown steakhouse (built as a Pendergastera saloon in 1911) isn’t in the same price point as Capital Grille or the American Restaurant, but it’s not the Golden Corral, either. The dry-aged steaks range from $29 for 8 ounces of prime rib to $62 for the 14-ounce Beefeater filet. (Unlike many of its competitors, the Majestic serves meals that include soup or salad and two side dishes.) When someone else is paying the tab, you might feel emboldened enough to order crab cakes or a charcuterie plate before dinner and, afterward, English-toffee bread pudding, a small glass of 20-year-old Taylor Fladgate tawny port, and an espresso. You should.