In Kansas City, Patrick Ryan is kind of a big deal.

But in Lawrence, where the James Beard-nominated chef recently opened his first Port Fonda restaurant on this side of the Kansas-Missouri border, “it’s been a relief for me that not everybody knows who I am,” he says.

It wasn’t even five years ago that Ryan began serving up rustic Mexican staples out of a refurbished 36-foot Airstream trailer on the streets of Kansas City. The buzz was immediate, and the demand “exhausting,” he says.

“I cooked every single night in the trailer. I was the guy. It was like the ‘Patrick Ryan Show,’ and it was really tough on me personally,” the 40-year-old recalls. “I want the (Lawrence) place to be really great, whether it’s about me or not.”

The hype hasn’t slowed down in the wake of Port Fonda’s move to its brick-and-mortar location in Westport two years ago — and, now, at 900 New Hampshire St. in a corner space adjacent to the TownePlace Suites by Marriott.

The Lawrence restaurant was buzzing with activity on a brisk, cloudy afternoon last week, where a diverse crowd of patrons scooped fresh salsa onto house-made pork rinds and slurped down bowls of tangy pozole verde while hip-hop beats pounded over the sound system.

It’s got a decidedly hipster-y feel, but Jamie Davila, manager for both Port Fonda locations, says he’s seen everyone from “19-year-olds to 70-year-olds” walk through the restaurant’s doors since opening in early November.

For its first few weeks in business, Port Fonda has been serving dinner only, Tuesday through Sunday. That’ll change this weekend when the eatery starts offering brunch on Saturdays and Sundays. From there on out, Port Fonda will serve lunch and dinner seven days a week — with the exception of Thanksgiving.

“We’d love to be something that’s here forever,” Davila says. “Somewhere you could see locals and people from out of town stopping in for a basketball game.”

Ryan agrees, likening the process of opening a restaurant to “much more of a marathon than a race.” It’s a fitting — yet seemingly contradictory — analogy for a guy who compares cooking in a professional kitchen to the “stress and pressure” of competitive sports.

He did both as a kid growing up in Overland Park. When he wasn’t on the soccer field or baseball diamond, Ryan was in the kitchen.

His grandfather, a Kentucky native whose family farmed vegetables and hogs, and grandmother, who hailed from New Orleans, lived just a few blocks away. On most days, Ryan recalls, you could find him picking produce from his grandparents’ garden and cooking it up in their kitchen.

By the time he was 6 or 7, Ryan could craft himself a decent broiled sandwich or scrambled eggs with ham. So when he turned 14, he got a job making pizzas at the local Chuck E. Cheese’s. He loved it — and “I kind of never stopped,” Ryan says.

From there, it was Latin-inspired spots like Jalapeno’s and Jose Peppers. He liked “the spice and the heat and the flavor” of Latin cuisine, even at the “Americanized Mexican restaurants” of Johnson County.

“When you’re a white kid growing up in Overland Park, that stuff was really new to me, and I thought it was really cool and exciting,” Ryan says. “I fell in love with the people and the culture.”

It’s not exactly what he’s doing at Port Fonda these days. His food is a tad pricier and more sophisticated, perhaps — Davila describes Ryan’s style as “Mexican street food with polish” — but Ryan, who says the Midwestern-skewing Mexican restaurants of his youth remain special to him, wants to craft something more along the lines of Chicago’s Frontera Grill, where he received much of his early training.

His focus at Port Fonda — both in Lawrence and Kansas City — is on service, atmosphere and other “finer details” that make up a great dining experience.

“I want to make sure we carry on everything that’s made the Westport location successful,” Ryan says.

After the New Year, he’ll begin retooling the menu — he expects a “70 percent overhaul” of the Westport original — to “get a lot more ‘Lawrence’ with it.”

“We really want to bring in a lot more locally farmed things, vegetarian items,” Ryan says. “Take the feedback from our customers and tailor it to what they want.”