The University News

Issue date: 2/18/08 Section: Culture

Media Credit: Laura Katzer A cup of Tomato Basil soup accompanied a panini-pressed muffaletta.

Café Europa is a charming little restaurant and bakery. The café's bright cheerfulness is instantly felt at the door. The interior atmosphere is purposely made cozy and provincial with colorful, homely decor. The front door opens to a display case lined with in-house baked goods and a coffee buffet. A larger room sits adjacent and is filled with small, inviting tables. This larger room also houses the café's open kitchen.

Good smells invited me in each time I visited. The atmosphere is both physically and mentally warming.

It is possible to believe spring is around the corner at Café Europa, even if the outside temperature is cold and forbidding.

The café is located in the Crestwood shops on 55th Street. Its location is very close to UMKC, so close that on a nice day it would be possible to walk there.

Café Europa serves lunch daily from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, the bakery stays open a little longer, until 4 p.m.

A small crew of employees carried out the service. Only one server cared for all the tables.

The menu was a list of treasured lunch favorites. It featured salads, sandwiches, soup, quiche and frittata. The menu was not long or incredibly varied but the menu items were carefully chosen and generally done well. The prices were high for a café lunch, but the portions were generous and the items were made by hand.

I enjoyed the quiche, which was spinach-feta, a menu mainstay with another flavor that changes daily. I chose the daily quiche flavored with bacon and cheddar cheese. The quiche was served with a choice of a green salad or a cup of soup and sliced baguette. I decided on the signature tomato-basil soup. The bacon cheddar quiche was so soft, creamy and packed with terrific flavor that it was hard to break away to taste the soup. The quiche was terrifically rich and tasted like it contained real cream and butter.

The tomato-basil was bland and a little tired but still a nice contrast to the rich quiche. I had the tomato-basil soup again on another day and it was drastically improved with a brighter tomato flavor and visible flecks of green basil.

I also tried a cup of the lentil soup when it was featured for the day. The lentil soup contained fragmented bits of earthy lentils and pieces of onion and carrot in a deeply flavorful stock.

The muffaletta was delicious. I also enjoyed half a muffaletta with a cup of tomato-basil soup. The muffaletta was comprised of nine-grain bread, Italian hams, salami, provolone cheese and a smear of puréed olive spread. It was pressed in a panini grill and served hot. The sandwich was pleasantly salty and remarkably balanced.

I could not resist the oversized cupcakes in the baker's case. I chose a lemon cupcake. The cake had a very moist and lightly lemon-infused crumb. The barely-yellow frosting was piped in a mass of pretty star-dots and tasted sweetly of lemon and sugar. The cupcake was very large and would be perfect to share.

Café Europa was an appealing oasis among the cold February days.

lkatzer@unews.com

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