If your summer travels take you to or through Kansas City, make a stop at Lidia's.
Lidia's Kansas City is one of Lidia Bastianich's six restaurants. Bastianich is the star of a PBS cooking show, cookbook author and friend of Mario Batali's. Her other restaurants are in New York City and Pittsburgh, so to have a taste of her fresh, authentic Italian food in the Midwest is a foodie blessing.
Locals and tourists stop for lunch and dinner in this renovated warehouse with tall ceilings, colorful blown glass sculptures and al fresco dining on a bricked terrace.
A couple of weeks ago, we stopped in for Sunday brunch, and it was perfection. You know those meals you have where you can't stop talking about what's on your plate? It was one of those.
Brunch began with coarse-ground wheat rolls, cherry foccacia bread and rustic sweet rolls with a trio of butters. Nothing makes me happier than a butter selection. In this case it was apricot jam butter, strawberry jam butter and crunchy sugar butter. The crunchy sugar butter was the first to go. My husband said he could have eaten it like ice cream.
The first course was a buffet of salads. But this isn't a buffet like you may be thinking. Salads, house-made salami and prosciutto, cheese and soups weren't presented in those typical stainless steel serving dishes. The food was presented beautifully in Italian pottery. I tasted a marinated eggplant salad, herbed potato salad, fresh peas with mint, tomatoes and mozzarella and many more.
The second course offered many selections, including gnocchi in a duck sauce with Parmigiano-Reggiano, beef tenderloin with twice-fried potatoes, pan-seared chicken livers over polenta and manicotti with fresh ricotta.
I love variety, so I chose the pasta-tasting trio. Wait staff roam from table to table with sauté pans, delicately placing each of the three pastas on your plates. The pastas of the day were pork-filled ravioli with lemon zest, penne l'arrabiata and a traditional Bolognese. I loved them all.
It's so hard to choose just one dessert from a dessert menu, but there was no need. All were displayed on a dessert buffet, which included blueberry crostata, bing cherry ricotta cheesecake, tiramisu, chocolate torte and olive oil and Meyer lemon cake. I had bites of each, plus a couple of 1-inch by 1-inch chocolate wafer cookies sprinkled with coarse sugar.
Brunch is $22 per person and is offered from 11 a.m. to p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.
Lidia's Kansas City
101 W. 22nd St. • Kansas City, Mo.
(816) 221-3722
