A steak, a cocktail, an elegant space. Inside KC restaurant with a ‘higher standard’

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Pierpont’s is hard to notice from the outside and difficult to forget on the inside.

The entrance barely stands out in cavernous Union Station, except for a hostess stand. But walk in and you’ll immediately find yourself inside an elegant, high-ceiling dining room — one of the most beautiful in Kansas City.

The centerpiece is an inviting bar, backed by a towering nine shelves of liquor. The whole place feels like an old-time jewel, as if it were polished up to a gleam and reopened after Union Station’s period of obsolescence in the 1980s and 1990s.

In fact, the restaurant, celebrating its 25th year, opened just weeks after Union Station’s reopening in 1999 at 39 W. Pershing Road — the space used to be a waiting room for women and children. Just one Pierpont’s exists, although the owners drew inspiration from the French restaurant Balthazar in New York. Even as the restaurant has on occasion updated its look over the years, the high ceilings and marble floors maintain the distinctive feel.

I’ve been to Pierpont’s perhaps half a dozen times over the past four years. I go to many other restaurants much more often, but every time at Pierpont’s has been special.

First, there’s the food. While the dinner menu includes several entrees (and sandwiches are available at lunch), I typically order a steak – and that steak is typically the Filet Pierpont.

The Filet Pierpont is $60, making it a special occasion meal on a reporter’s salary. But it is worth every dollar.

A filet, cooked to your liking, comes with garlic whipped potatoes and green beans. What sets the dish apart, however, is a blue cheese cream sauce with malted figs. The slight funk of the blue cheese is balanced by the sweetness and tang of the figs.

Steak and blue cheese is a classic combination. Matt Barnes, executive chef, said that when he first came to the restaurant, the dish was served with a chocolate balsamic drizzle. He replaced the drizzle with figs marinated in a reduction of malt vinegar and a “few other secret ingredients.”

“I love figs a lot, so I thought it was a really good pairing with the blue cheese and the steak itself,” Barnes said. “The chocolate to me was a little bit much for the blue cheese. So I felt like we needed to pull that back a little bit, but without sacrificing the sweet and savory elements that are going on.”

Personally, I love all kinds of cheese and would open an office inside a Better Cheddar if I could. But for those who may not appreciate blue cheese, Pierpont’s also offers a coffee and ancho chile-rubbed Kansas City strip, as well as classic Kansas City strip, ribeye and filet mignon cuts.

The second element that makes Pierpont’s special is the cocktails. Although the bartender will happily stir or shake up whatever you want, I’ve zeroed in on the Old Fashioned Revolution, one of the signature drinks.

I have particular preferences on the construction of classic cocktails. I’ve even had friendly debates with my colleague Daniel Desrochers, The Star’s Washington correspondent (for me, an ideal o ld fashioned is rye whiskey, simple syrup, angostura and orange bitters, stirred and poured over a large rock).

The Old Fashioned Revolution doesn’t follow my typical preferences. It’s better. It combines bourbon and rye, and Angostura amaro (in the place of bitters) with dry Curaçao orange liqueur. The result is a more complex, bolder cocktail you still recognize as an old fashioned.

The cocktail has its genesis in a drink Scott Deigert, Pierpont’s bar director, created for his own wedding. At this point, it’s the restaurant’s bestselling cocktail.

“The idea was to take that kind of classic cocktail that everybody knows and just give it a little bit of a face-lift and make it a little more fun,” Deigert said.

And then there’s the service. Every time I have been to the restaurant, whether for dinner or a happy hour, the wait staff and bar staff have always been warm and friendly, adept at being attentive without becoming overbearing.

When I had dinner at Pierpont’s a few weeks ago (the restaurant didn’t know then that I was writing this piece), my wife, Theresa, ordered the roasted pheasant but was told by our server the restaurant was out. The server gave her a few minutes to decide on something else, but when she returned she informed us that after checking with the kitchen they could prepare the entree after all.

That’s a small thing, and the kind of thing that doubtless happens in restaurants all the time. But it’s also easy to imagine wait staff, facing a busy evening and hungry tables, simply moving on.

Pierpont’s owner Mary Holland told me the level of service is very intentional. Servers typically come to the restaurant with some level of experience in fine dining, or a lot of years serving with knowledge of wine.

“It’s a higher standard and an elevated level of service,” Holland said.

Indeed.