Yahoo Movies A big fat Greek dish + 48 Mexican ice cream flavors
Happy Friday, and welcome back to Let’s Dish — your one-stop shop for all things eats in Kansas City.
This week, we’ll take you inside a few family-owned restaurants: Let’s Dish editor Sharon builds her ideal gyros at a Johnson County staple, and Lisa raves about the extensive array of Mexican ice cream flavors from a small KC company.
Plus, stick around for a suggestion from one of our readers.
Gyro Plate at Mr. Gyros
The Star’s enterprise editor Sharon Hoffmann wants to make sure we’re all on the same page: It’s not a “jye-ro,” rhymes with Cairo. It’s not a “hero” — that’s a sub sandwich. A gyro is pronounced “year-oh.”
“Like the year of 2023,” explains DeeDee Jovaras, who as co-owner of Mr. Gyro’s Greek Food & Pastry with her husband, Chris, keeps that little lesson handy.
Regardless of how you say it, at this restaurant, the gyro ($8.25) is a delicious bestseller, with warm, pillowy pita bread wrapped like a taco around savory slices of meat, along with tomatoes, onions and tzatziki sauce (a yummy blend of sour cream, cucumber and secret seasonings).
Yet, Sharon is here to tell you to order something else. She’s been going to Mr. Gyro’s for decades, and has found that when she orders that sandwich, she’ll eat it all at once. It quickly becomes a distant memory.
Instead, Sharon will spend a little more and order the Gyro Plate ($10.95) and a large Greek salad ($9), and get two, maybe three meals out of it. Plus, she gets the joy of creation.
Both the plate and the salad come with small triangles of pita, the perfect amount for the mound of meat. You take a piece of the pita and pile a few slices of meat on top. Add a slice of tomato and a slice of onion. Fold it over and dunk it in the tzatziki sauce. Bliss.
Cleanse your palate every so often with bites of the salad, loaded with feta cheese and tangy dressing. More bliss.
Read more about the family behind the restaurants here.
Ice cream at Palacana
In her family growing up, ice cream was basic for The Star’s Lisa Lopez: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate. Maybe a few other flavors, if they were lucky.
Maybe that’s why as an adult, she cherishes Palacana, a family-owned local company that churns out 48 ice cream flavors at a rate of 80 tubs a day, or 450 a week.
And that’s not even counting the paletas — Mexican ice pops made from fruit or an ice cream base. Palacana makes 6,000 of them a day in 44 flavors.
Palacana makes all sorts of ice cream flavors in gorgeous bright colors, different ones like pine nut, dolce de leche and horchata ($4.59 per serving). The paletas ($2.29 each) come in so many flavors too, some sprinkled with spicy tajin.
But Lisa’s favorite thing to order there is the strawberry-banana smoothie ($5.99). It’s made with fresh fruit and tastes just like a bowl of fresh strawberries with a few slivers of banana. Lisa says she hasn’t found a better smoothie anywhere in the KC area.
Owner José Luis Valdez, whose first job was selling paletas on the streets of his native Mexico at age 7, opened his first ice cream store in 2004 along with his wife, Lucia Fonseca, and their two daughters. They had no business experience, but they had dedication.
Read more about the small shop-turned-sizable operation here.
My standout dish of the week
I’ve never been to Australia, but I didn’t have to hop on a daylong flight to get my first taste of food from the land down under.
I was first introduced to the cuisine by Banksia, an Australian bakehouse and cafe tucked in the Library District (and now the South Plaza, too), and I’m convinced the cozy spot could fulfill my brunch cravings for any occasion.
I took my girlfriend there for her first visit last week, and we split a bowl of their biscuits and gravy, which are great, and the ricotta hotcakes, which are the real star of the menu.
The hotcakes take 20 minutes to prepare, so be prepared to wait — and be delighted you did. They’re thicker than pancakes, built with ricotta that makes the middle almost custard-like and doused with a syrup-y sweet honeycomb butter you’ll be scooping off the plate.
Topped with caramelized banana and fresh strawberries, there’s no sweeter treat to start your day.
Your top eats
Like Sharon’s favorite dish, our reader’s suggestion this week leaves plenty for leftovers. Reader Chas Vincent recommends the smoked pork chop dinner with a loaded baked potato at Brobecks Barbecue, a dish only available during Friday and Saturday dinners.
It’s “savory, filling, delicious and enough for two meals,” Vincent said. Plus, the “chops are always smoked to perfection.”
Do you have another favorite local dish you think I should include in this newsletter? Email me, abooth@kcstar.com, or fill out this form to let us know.
À la carte
✴️ Just 17 months after expanding, a KC barbecue joint has shut down both its new spot and its original location. “Financially we just couldn’t carry on,” the owners told The Star’s Joyce Smith.
✴️ A Middle Eastern kitchen whose owner used to operate restaurants in his native Jordan before moving to Kansas City recently opened shop in this popular food hall.
✴️ After signing its first multi-unit franchise agreement, this KC-based fast-casual chain plans to open 75 locations in at least two states.
✴️ A KCK Mexican grill, a bar in Prairiefire and a Korean hot dog chain were among the 16 local restaurants cited with seven or more health violations in the latest round of inspections.
Hungry for more?
We want your opinion: Do you have a favorite dish at a KC restaurant you think we should try? Let us know here, or email Sharon Hoffmann, our editor coordinating this series: shoffmann@kcstar.com.
Check out all the restaurants we’ve covered in this series here.
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Happy eating! We’ll see you next week.
