Candlelight Cuisine is on summer break. However, beginning the fall, join us each Sunday following Candlelight Communion, all are invited to enjoy a unique dinner experience presented by the chefs of St. Andrew's. Come for excellent food and even better fellowship!

Our Menu:

9/12 - ("Backyard" Cookout) - Burgers, Potato Salad, Salad

9/19 - Pasta w/ Late Summer Vegetables, Salad,

9/26 - Kabobs (beef and chicken), Summer Pea and Roasted Red Pepper Pasta Salad

10/3 - Eggplant Parmesan, Meatballs, Pasta w/ red sauce, salad

10/10 - Slow-Roasted Pork with Spicy Scratchings, Cous cous, salad

10/17 - Short Rib Ragu, Polenta, Salad

10/24 - Macaroni & Cheese (lobster, wild mushrooms & Gouda, ham), Salad

10/31 - no class - Halloween

11/7 - Greek Chicken and Potatoes, Salad, Hummus & Pita (Boy Scout Court of Honor)

11/14 - Pork Tacos, Pueblo Rice, Black Beans, Salad, Chips & Salsa

11/21 - Lamb Stew, Lentil Stew, Salad

11/28 - First Sunday of Advent - no dinner

12/6 - Pork Loin Roast in Garlic, Fennel, and Rosemary, Mashed Potatoes, Cooked Greens, Salad

12/12 - Eggplant stew, Moroccan Beef, Polenta, Salad

12/19 - Christmas cookies, Creole night (seafood gumbo, red beans & rice, jambalaya), Salad

12/26 - No Dinner

Please note: menu is subject to change based on availability of ingredients, changes to the church calendar, and the whims of the chefs.

We were featured in the Kansas City Star!

Candlelight Cuisine' shatters the stereotype of church basement dining

By JAMES A. FUSSELL
The Kansas City Star

Table for two, monsieur?

Almost everything about this cozy eatery says fine dining: the white tablecloths, the candles and crusty French baguettes; the authentic shrimp Creole and bread pudding with bourbon sauce; the Starbucks coffee and an associate Episcopal rector saying grace.

Wait. An Episcopal rector?

But of course.

As much as the food might say otherwise, this is not a pricey Brookside bistro. The 70 or so people who enjoyed a free-will-offering meal here on a recent Sunday evening had just finished a church service upstairs at Kansas City’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.

Dust off the good china, Father, this ain’t your grandma’s church potluck. This is “Candlelight Cuisine,” a Sunday night feast prepared by professional chefs. It proves that food served in the lower level of a church doesn’t have to be lower level in quality.

“What I hear a lot is somebody says, ‘I might as well be in a restaurant,’ ” said the Rev. John Spicer, associate rector at St. Andrew’s. “ ‘This is what I’d get if I went to a bistro in Brookside, much less a church.’ ”

Instead of chili nights, pancake feeds or fish fries, St. Andrews, 6401 Wornall Terrace in Brookside, offers more nuanced fare. For a suggested $5 donation, you get meals like chicken cacciatore, eggplant Marrakesh with couscous, jambalaya, wild game, peach cobbler and coconut lime cupcakes. On a recent night, the chefs changed the menu to Haitian food and gave the donations collected to the Episcopal Relief and Development Fund to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

The menu included griot (Haitian-style fried pork similar to carnitas), riz national (Haitian red beans and rice), fried plantains, a spicy Haitian slaw with cabbage, carrots and Scotch bonnet peppers, and sweet potato pudding.

Chip Smith, a parishioner and professional chef with a background in youth ministry, in early 2008 suggested starting the weekly dinners as a means of outreach. The intent was to attract hungry students from the University of Missouri-Kansas City to a more modern Sunday evening Taize service of silent reflection and easy meditative chants before dinner.

Smith volunteered to cook the meals. Then another parishioner (and chef), Janet Sheffey, signed on, along with a small, dedicated crew of helpers. The resulting meals surprised diners with the level of refinement and culinary skill.

While the dinners didn’t attract the college kids, they were a huge hit with people who valued fine dining. Now the compliments are rolling in, along with the diners.

Most are from the neighborhood. But as word spread, others started showing up — people from Johnson County, the Northland, Kansas City, Kan., and elsewhere. And they’re not all Episcopalians. They’re Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans and people who don’t usually attend church.

And, of course, the meal is a hit with St. Andrew’s parishioners, too.

“We’ve had some exquisite meals here,” said Lucy Shelton of Prairie Village. “They’re creative, and it’s not conventional church food. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.”

St. Andrew’s started offering the special Sunday night dinner in its “undercroft” — a fancy word for a church basement — in the fall of 2008. And although diners will tell you the food is good enough for a table for two, this food is served at communal tables of eight.

“Breaking bread is a wonderful way of forming community,” Spicer said. “The more opportunities that we offer for people to sit and eat together, it just helps people get to know each other better.”

It doesn’t hurt that everything tastes so good.

“I’ve never had a bland meal here, even when they just emptied the refrigerator for the holidays,” said the Rev. Fred Mann, the rector at St. Andrew’s.

Smith takes the lead on the entrees, Sheffey handles the desserts, and the crew pitches in wherever needed.

“Janet and I get together in the late summer, and then again this time of year to plan four months in advance,” Smith said. “We usually stick to that about 75 percent of the time. But as different things come up, or we get excited about some new idea, it changes.”

Making good food in large batches isn’t easy, especially when you don’t know how many will show up.

“It was tough in the beginning,” Sheffey said. “We made too much food. When it started out, we would have like 12 people one week, and 40 the next. Things have stabilized now, and we’ve learned to better gauge the interest week to week.”

Smith works as a chef at Entrée Vous, a take-home dining and catering business near 95th Street and Mission Road in Leawood. Sheffey worked as a chef at Bella Napoli in Brookside but had to quit about a year ago after her husband was diagnosed with brain cancer. Along with their loyal crew, they have found a home away from home and a fun and supportive family that’s far more than the sum of its parts.

St. Andrew’s kitchen is a place of work. But on Sunday nights, it’s also a place of fun.

On this night, the shrimp Creole was a little too tomatoey. Smith said he was going to add some cider vinegar to it to balance it out.

“Maybe we could just pour some rum on it and light it on fire,” Sheffey shot back over the loud music. “Then no one would care if it tasted bad, because it would be flaming!”

A half-hour before service, the place was electric. As the chefs stirred and sliced, the crew — Lori Massen, Sally Stuart, Barbara McCluskey, Elizabeth McInnis — cut, chopped and danced to the music blaring through Sheffey’s iPod. When a Todd Rundgren song came on, the crew got into it.

“Leroy, boy is that you? I thought your post-hangin’ days were through.”

“Turn it up!”

As the song reached the chorus the whole group began to sing. Sheffey took the lead, swaying and closing her eyes and belting it out like she was singing in the shower.

“WE GOTTA GET YOU A WO-MAN … IT’S LIKE NOTHIN’ ELSE TO MAKE YOU FEEL SURE YOU’RE ALIVE.”

Unless it’s cooking at your church with your pals a rollicking on a Sunday evening.

For Sheffey, the experience has been a godsend.

“It’s almost like an oasis for me,” she said. “There is so much love in that room. If someone’s having a bad day, we talk about it. We’ve talked about the difficulties of care-giving and cancer. We’ve talked about loneliness, because Lori is divorced and raising two children. We talk about the pressures of family life. The food is important, but the primary ingredient of our meals is love.”

Massen, the crew’s coffee maven, has felt that love.

Although she has struggled with family challenges and with Lyme disease and a resulting brain infection, she is now happier — and healthier — than she has been in years. A lifelong Catholic, she now considers St. Andrew’s home. She credits much of her newfound health and happiness to the peace that has come from the gentle meditations of the Taize service and the joy she has found with the kitchen crew afterward.

“I don’t know if you ever saw the movie ‘What About Bob?’ ” she said. “They all get on the boat and just go. And there’s something wrong with each one of them. That’s who we are. And we all fit.”

As they help each other work on the meal, Massen said, they also help each other work on their lives.

“It’s like Janet, whose husband is dying of brain cancer,” Massen said. “She can come here and absolutely bring her best. There’s an energy that happens, a synergy. And I didn’t know that it was there until they suckered me in to start helping them. I missed one day — and I’ve only missed two times in a year and a half — and they missed me. I had no idea they’d miss me! But when I got back, Sally put me in (a headlock) and said ‘You’ve got to get permission to miss.’ That’s when I learned that what we had there was magic. We were making magic.”

Along with some impressive meals.