Plate Restaurant

The Restaurant

Plate Restaurant has occupied its corner on West 63rd Street in Brookside, four blocks south of the Country Club Plaza, since 2014. The room is narrow and warm, about sixty seats across small wooden tables, banquettes along one wall, an open kitchen at the back, and a long communal table at the front that seats twelve and has become the neighbourhood's preferred team-dinner anchor. The cooking, run by chef-owner Michael Foust, is Italian-American with a particular focus on hand-cut pasta, wood-fired flatbreads, and a short steak-and-seafood section that runs about six secondi at any given time.

The pasta programme is the centre of the menu and what keeps Brookside regulars returning. The hand-rolled pici with wild boar ragù is the long-standing signature; a pappardelle with veal-and-pork sugo, a cavatelli with rapini and house-made sausage, and a black-pepper bucatini cacio e pepe rotate through the menu. Wood-fired flatbreads, a margherita, a fungi-and-truffle, a fennel-sausage-and-broccoli rabe, are shared starters at every table. The secondi runs a hanger steak with salsa verde, a roasted half chicken with rosemary, a daily fish preparation, and a slow-braised short rib that is the kitchen's most-ordered main.

The wine list is Italian-leaning, about 150 references with depth in Tuscany, Piedmont, and Sicily, and the by-the-glass programme is unusually deep at about thirty pours rotating monthly. Service is neighbourhood-warm rather than formal, and the communal table at the front operates on a first-come-first-seat policy for parties under four with full reservations behind it for groups of six and up. Plate's value-for-money, a four-course shared dinner with a bottle of Chianti for about $100 a head, is the strongest in this set, and the room remains a favourite of Kansas City's restaurant industry itself.