A culinary tour of Kansas City, the Midwestern city where food is ruled by flame

In the space of 10 minutes, what was a small scattering of people outside Chef J BBQ has become a sizeable queue. Under an azure dome of Midwest sky, the November air is crisp in Kansas City’s West Bottoms neighbourhood as midday approaches. There’s no obvious restaurant signage here, save for a faded palette leaning against a wall with white painted lettering on each scratched plank, advertising beef brisket, turkey, pork ribs, burnt ends.

The doors open and we’re beckoned up the creaking wooden stairs of Chef J’s old redbrick townhouse. Inside, a large chalkboard hanging above a counter flanked by pillars of corrugated iron advertises an array of cuts, sandwiches and sides; a intense whiff of smoke and meat emanates from the kitchen behind.

“I’m a rough-around-the-edges kinda guy,” says owner and pitmaster Justin ‘J’ Easterwood, looking proudly around the restaurant he opened in 2020. “I don’t like new and shiny stuff.”

Wearing a dull green sweater with brown hair tied back into a ponytail and red tattoos dancing up his right arm, Justin has been a devotee of the flame since his teens. Now, years later, a monstrous 1,000-gallon smoker sits outside his restaurant like a submarine in a dry dock, burning all night long. He cooks as many slabs of fresh brisket as possible for the next day, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.

“There’s something to be said about cooking over fire,” Justin tells me. “You have to adjust to what it’s doing — it’s not just a question of turning on a burner or setting the oven to high. That fire dictates what’s going on flavour-wise. You gotta respect the fire. It really is like a living, breathing thing.”

And from those crackling embers, Justin presents me with a slice of fatty brisket, caramelised ribs with a sweet glaze and some delicate pork belly burnt ends. Burnt ends, a Kansas City barbecue staple, are usually taken from beef brisket, but Justin prefers pork. They’re soft, sweet and with a light kick from the peppery rub. Biting into the brisket, any toughness soon falls away into a buttery, salted nirvana.

Justin tends to eschew the thick, sticky molasses-heavy sauces that Kansas City barbecue is also known for, preferring to let the meat’s natural flavours shine through. But this is a city that’s always played a little fast and loose with the rules.

Straddling the state line between Missouri and Kansas, the city they call ‘KC’ sits right in the heart of America’s Midwest; in the 19th century, it was a vital trading post and crossroads on the Missouri River. When prohibition arrived in the 1920s, Kansas City developed a lawless reputation under mob boss Tom Pendergast and its speakeasies attracted celebrities, politicians, misfits and musicians, all looking to get their kicks away from the prying eyes of the law.

Much of this activity took place at the smoke-filled jazz clubs and drinking dens along 18th and Vine, a largely African-American neighbourhood where Henry Perry, a few years earlier, had begun barbecuing in an outdoor pit by an old streetcar barn. Serving diced cuts of smoked meat wrapped in newspaper, Henry’s style of cooking caught on, and eventually led to the opening of the iconic Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue on the same spot in 1949, whose guests have since included the likes of Jack Nicholson and Barack Obama. Almost a century after the so-called ‘father of Kansas City barbecue’ began serving smoked meats, there are more than 100 barbecue restaurants scattered across KC.

It’s likely that the freewheeling nature of the city’s past allowed it to be more laissez-faire with its definition of barbecue, too. To put it simply — these days, pretty much anything goes. Smokehouses across Texas traditionally fire up beef briskets that are light on sauces or marinades, while over in the Carolinas, you’ll find pork shoulder, pulled pork and whole hogs coated in thinner vinegar marinades or spicy mustard sauces. But in Kansas, everything is on the table and everyone is invited to the party. Especially newcomers.

Opened in 2014 in Midtown, Q39’s exposed brick walls host sepia photos, newspaper clippings, sauce jars for sale and trophies won by its late founder and local barbecue legend Rob Magee. TVs line the space above the bar, though few customers pay attention to them, instead metronomically lifting their heads between food and conversation.

“I’d led kitchens, I’d opened hotels, but I’d never run a barbecue restaurant before,” says executive chef Philip Thompson, about his journey to Q39 as we sit at a table near the bar.

For a cuisine so quintessentially American, it’s a surreal experience to be talking with a fellow Brit as he explains, in a mid-Atlantic drawl, how he became a barbecue convert. Wide-eyed and raising his hands for emphasis when speaking, Philip tells me he’s lived in the US for almost 20 years and displays a student-like reverence for the world he’s adopted.

“Burnt ends is what KC barbecue is all about,” he says, slicing off a crispy end of brisket during a meandering tour through Q39’s warren of kitchen corridors, where huge smokers burn hickory wood for up to 16 hours at a time. I chew slowly to savour every last second of this heavenly square, where the charred end contrasts deliriously well with the succulent pink interior, and I can see why Philip playfully refers to them as ‘meat marshmallows’. Amazingly, such was the disdain with which burnt ends were treated during barbecue’s infancy, they were once handed out for free at counters while orders were taken.

“At the time, they were called burnt edges,” Philip explains. “After a while, the chefs realised that this part of the brisket has a really nice marbling of fat, so they’d separate that from the brisket, dice it into cubes and call it burnt ends.”

Back at the table, I’m treated to some tender pork belly, a thicker, juicier cut of brisket and some magnificent chicken wings tossed in chipotle barbecue sauce and grilled for extra caramelisation. I’m being bludgeoned by barbecue in its most naked form, but this town — especially in old-school joints like Gates BBQ and Arthur Bryant’s — also loves throwing its finest cuts into overflowing sauce-laden sandwiches. A 10-minute drive from here, deeper into KC’s suburban sprawl, is a place serving arguably the city’s most unusual barbecue in bread.

In its car park, the glare of the bright Midwest sun makes it hard to read any of the vehicles’ number plates, so I need to squint a little, but my eyes don’t deceive me: there are several California and Louisiana plates alongside the usual flurry of pale blue Kansas ones. Central California is around a 1,700-mile drive, so the sloping parking lot at Joe’s Kansas City BBQ is the first indication of the sort of dedicated pilgrims the place attracts.

Back in 2005, Anthony Bourdain, the late chef and TV presenter brought national attention to this mint-green intersection joint, which doubles as a petrol station.

“Oh, he changed our whole business. Put us on the map as a destination — a place to go,” says Joe’s director of marketing Eric Tadda, as we take a seat near a window and watch hulking SUVs rumble by on the nearby highway while a lonesome country music song rings out of the mounted speakers above.

There’s a certain novelty appeal that comes with the convergence of a gas station and Bourdain’s seal of approval, but this isn’t the only reason folks from out of state visit. The Z-Man sandwich is another. I tell Eric I’m not leaving without trying the legendary sandwich, named after local radio DJ Mike Zerek (‘the Z-Man’), who visited relentlessly, always asking for a brisket sandwich topped with melted cheese and two onion rings.

“He just kept ordering it,” explains Eric. “So, they had a competition to name the sandwich and nothing stuck more than ‘Z-Man’. It just became a hit.”

The Z-Man is smaller than I expect, but after the first bite, I can see why they sell over 200 a day. The onion rings blend perfectly with the thinner cuts of smoky brisket sliced especially for this, while the texture is gloriously softened by melted cheese inside a buttered and toasted kaiser roll. Not only is this the best thing I’ve eaten in KC, the grab-and-go sandwich is also one of the best, entry-level items for anyone interested in exploring barbecue culture.

In this laid-back, anything goes barbecue town, there really is only one rule — arrive with a voracious appetite.