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Conrad's Restaurant & Alehouse is almost certainly the biggest dining operation in Liberty.It's also clearly a prototype for the kind of combination restaurant and saloon that plays well in various suburbs. I have no trouble picturing another, equally big Conrad's in Olathe or in Lee's Summit.

Shawn Conrad Barber, you see, knows a few things about the restaurant business. For decades, his parents ran the downtown-KC diner Connie's, located from 1968 to 2002 in the Argyle Building , and satellite versions of the same operation in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Sioux City, Iowa. Barber chose a different path, working as a professional photographer.But he has come around to the idea that there might be more money in pork chops than in family portraits.

No one can say he hasn't thought big. Barber has divided the former retail space in two, installing a family-friendly, modestly priced dining room on one side and a noisier, livelier  lounge on the other. The latter, where the majority of Barber's clientele seems to end up, is dominated by a long bar that has 21 beers on tap. There are pool tables, a semi-enclosed patio, TV screens and an interactive golf game. The Alehouse side serves the same menu the dining room does.

On both of my visits, I chose to sit in the less raucous restaurant, which isn't always less noisy. During my first visit, so many small children were packed into the dining room that I feared I'd been escorted into a Chuck E. Cheese by mistake. Apparently, Liberty has a lot of young families who have been waiting for a place that offers the alluring combination of children's menus and $3 glasses of sangria.

That's not really my scene. But one afternoon, I found myself at liberty in Liberty and unexpectedly hungry. From a shopping strip on Highway 291, Conrad's beckoned, offering a more dignified solution than the CiCi's Pizza in the same center.

Even from the outside,MileWeb Exclusive Features Conrad's looks cavernous — nearly the length of a Wal-Mart, I'm telling you. The interior of the dining room is a little clubby — stone walls and dark wood — with a few mounted canvases (you could call them art if you're feeling generous), silk-screened with restaurant platitudes. One reads: "Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity." Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who never lived to see the age of the highway-ramp strip mall, is credited with that statement. Would he have ordered the $11.99 chicken piccata at Conrad's? It does, after all, come with two side dishes.

My server that evening was a willowy young woman who brought an ecstatic fervor to her descriptions of the better dishes at Conrad's. The menu at this restaurant hews closely to comfort-food favorites — a Cajun-style pasta with andouille sausage and a Chablis sauce is about as exotic as Conrad's gets. She didn't suggest anything especially elaborate, so her advice was pretty much on point.

There are a couple of steaks priced over $20, including an aged 8-ounce filet mignon — it was as tender and perfectly grilled as something from a proper steakhouse. But on my first visit, I decided to order what the couple at the next table seemed very satisfied with: a 10-ounce top sirloin, served with two side dishes, for $16. I've always believed that any joint that can make a cheap steak taste good can do almost anything right, and Conrad's does indeed serve a fine slab of budget beef. What I tried was nearly fork-tender and grilled precisely as I'd ordered it.

My server's guidance went sideways, though, when she steered me toward a "topper" for my steak. The house-made crab cake that came out was nearly as big as the steak, a hefty little puck made with far too much breading and a fearsome amount of black pepper.

"Didn't you like your crab cake?" she asked when she came for the plate. "It's one of our specialties."

I don't know what this "specialty" says about the culinary tastes of Liberty, but it was one of the few misfires I tasted at Conrad's. The grilled applewood shrimp appetizer was another, but only because the five tiny shrimp looked marooned on a big appetizer plate. They needed a saucer.

Far more satisfying were the boneless, bacon-wrapped pork chops, succulent and moist and blanketed with a savory apple-and-bacon chutney. They were particularly good with a mound of creamy mashed potatoes (the real thing) and sautéed fresh broccoli. It was no surprise that the macaroni and cheese here comes in a big portion, but I was pleasantly shocked by its tastiness. Under a crispy crust, the sauce of cheddar, mozzarella, parmesan and pepper jack was delicious.
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