The Antler Room, Kansas City 

You ever taste a dish at a restaurant that is simply so amazing you say to your wife "What the fuck is in this?!"

There are three kinds of restaurant food in this world; Good, Better, and Wow! Most restaurant food these days is Better as most restaurants can no longer get by serving just Good food - they're are too many restaurants that serve Better food. So much so that eating Better food is starting to become a letdown. The restaurant standard in this world has risen to a level, such that something that was Very Good thirty years ago just doesn't get the job done anymore.

How does one find a restaurant that serves Wow food? Well, I guess you could try Yelp (or even TripAdvisor if hard-pressed). Though I've found most of their reviews lacking and at best uninspired. I think a better way is to combine a little old-fashioned conversation with serendipity, which is exactly what led my wife and me to The Antler Room.

A few months back we were staying at an Airbnb in the Crossroads (Kansas City) and met a fellow traveler and Airbnber named Steve on the rear balcony. He had moved back to K.C. from L..A. .and served up some interesting K.C. color. I immediately warmed to him when I noticed his Yeti tumbler had the letters "FTO" printed on it. I asked him what the acronym meant and he replied "Fuck the Olympics". Now I didn't know why he wanted to fuck 'em, but I thought to myself "I like this guy". He went on to explain how he disliked the general corruptness and opacity. He made a compelling argument, and I must admit that over the years I have found the Olympics more and more suspect, so much so that this last time around I didn't watch at all - though in my case it might have more to do with the inclusion of Trampolining at the 2016 games. Steve had just started working at The Antler Room and invited us to dine there.

With a name like The Antler Room, I led myself to believe that I might be dining on something that used to have antlers - maybe venison, beef, or venison¹? Thankfully the name referred more to the ambiance and less to the cuisine, as this place served small plates (or should I say "a rotating menu of elegant small plates paired with an international natural wine selection, regional beers, and refreshing house cocktails) with a vegetarian and pescatarian bent.

After sitting down on a two-top located in the Covid safety zone located exactly where the now open garage door would sit, I immediately started looking for Steve while perusing the cocktail list. I liked that each cocktail entry was just a list of ingredients - there were no cute names like Sex on the Floor, or Grow a Pear. Two entries stood out for their Flackhattaness:

• Bourbon, blanc vermouth, banana liquor, bitters $14

• Rye, fino sherry, meletti amaro², orange bitters $13

Banana liquor sounded a little too girly to compliment the manliness that is a Flackhattan (though Steve assured me "it works"), so I went with my second option (on the rocks, of course). The delivered drink was solid, though next time I might give the banana liquor option a try, as the "rich and caramel-y, almost chocolate-y, without being cloying in the least . . . a fascinating array of flavors, from saffron to anise, resulting in a balanced, complex liqueur," of the amaro was just a little too much. Also, it was missing a cherry (or two), though it came with the de rigueur large cube of ice.

Later I learned that the rye was Old Overholt which in retrotaste didn't make the drink any better. About 15 years ago I discovered Old Overholt Rye in my brother-in-law's liquor cabinet and soon after incorporated it into mine. It reminded me of my days in sales where I sold products that were deemed a "fighting brand" - a lower-priced offering to take on, and ideally take out, specific competitors that are attempting to underprice them. Old Overholt was just that, a bottom shelf 80 proof rye that ran, if my memory still serves me, $14 for 750 ml.. It was kept on my bottom shelf also, to make an appearance at the end of the night, when guests' vision and taste buds were slightly impaired.

Well, that was a long time ago, and since Old Overholt has become so trendy that first-class restaurants like The Antler Room can now serve it in $13 cocktails without a hint of remorse. It kind of reminded me of what happened years ago to PBR, when for a time it went from white trash to white tablecloth. I always knew my brother-in-law was a trendsetter.

Each of the four small plates we ordered was excellent: heirloom tomato salad, brined and roasted cauliflower, octopus & baba ghanoush, and duck confit. Like the cocktail listing, each small plate entry is just a list of ingredients. My wife ordered an orange wine³, which paired quite nicely with them all.

September 29, 2021

Footnotes

¹ Venison while commonly referring to the meat of deer, originally meant the meat of a game animal, but now refers primarily to the meat of horned ungulates such as deer, elk, bison, antelopes, and even giraffe.

² Amaro (Italian for "bitter") is an Italian herbal liqueur that is commonly consumed as an after-dinner digestif. It usually has a bitter-sweet flavor, sometimes syrupy, and has an alcohol content between 16% and 40%. It is typically produced by macerating herbs, roots, flowers, bark, and/or citrus peels in alcohol, either neutral spirits or wine, mixing the filtrate with sugar syrup, and allowing the mixture to age in casks or bottles.

³ Orange wine is a type of wine made from white wine grapes, where the skins are not removed, as in typical white wine production, and stay in contact with the juice for days or even months. Similar in process to rosé, but using the skins of white grapes that stay in contact with the juice for a much longer time resulting in both color and tannins being pulled out of the skins. This results in a white wine with an orange color that has some of the qualities of a red.