Letter from the Editor: Smoke gets in your eyes

A full plate of Chef J BBQ. // Photo by Chase Castor

Whenever I’m in a rideshare or taxi, I always ask the driver what his recent rides have chosen as a topic of inquiry or opinion. “What do folks think about the state of the city? What’s on everyone’s mind? What’s the weirdest argument you’ve had this week?” Akin to conversations with bartenders or politicians, it feels important to my job as a journalist—taking the pulse of the city by finding out where everyone else’s head is at. 

I have learned that there is one, inevitably, that no driver can escape: The BBQ Question That Becomes Debate.

It begins when the passenger asks the driver what the best BBQ in town is. This is, of course, a trap. No one can answer this. It is a prank of a question. It is a question that I ask politicians in interviews when I want to startle them from the outset and let them know this will not be a walk-in-the-park conversation. Anyone can obviously answer with a degree of certainty a question about what their preference in BBQ joints might lean toward, but to answer the question of what is the “Best BBQ in KC” is to embark on a Sisyphean task. With a PowerPoint presentation full of charts, graphs, metrics, and other data, you could still not convince another hardened Kansas Citian to switch their allegiance. You would simply be shut down and labeled a fool unless you happened to share an opinion with the original speaker—in which case, huzzah, you’re both geniuses and heroes among men. 

“People in Kansas City like to talk about BBQ” is not, exactly, a revelation. This is not new information to anyone. To some, it might come as a surprise how quickly the opposite can become true—that two folks in the metro will start talking about cooked meats and just as quickly end the conversation, recognizing either that there are too many places this could go or that, with the aforementioned overwhelming number of options and styles, one can simply skip to the end by acknowledging some form of “BBQ good. Hm. Yes.”

But what I find interesting is how frequently drivers tell me that, especially with folks coming into the city, this seemingly innocuous question about where to find pleasant food is insidiously a setup. 

“They just want to fight with me. They just want to tell me how BBQ is better in the city they’re from or another city they’ve visited, and I don’t really have time to defend the concept of all restaurants in KC against the idea of every place with slow-cooked meat in Austin.” This quote was said to me by a driver picking me up from the airport, whose nickname is, unfortunately, “BBQ”—contributing to why I’m sure some outsiders feel the need to start this debate with him. He’s certainly far from alone in having that experience.

My conversation with “BBQ” happened just before the Chiefs took their run at the Super Bowl this year and when the national football audience had seemed to decide they were all rooting against us. Sports commentators took to calling this our “Villain Era” in a butchering of Taylor Swift’s concept of boundaries and self-care, but sure—we were at the height of our Villain Era. 

The drivers who have repeated the same beats in various stories of travelers who come here, seemingly prepped for a fight they have invented in their heads against KC BBQ superiority, makes me think that perhaps our city’s cuisine has always been in its Villain Era. Sure, people from Texas or North Carolina or St. Louis have shit to talk on us, but the reason they keep talking shit is because we’re really fucking good at what we do. This city’s expansive BBQ offerings—and the culture around them—are enough to sustain a yearly issue from us on that subject and that subject alone.

No one swings at you if you aren’t the champ.

So welcome to the March issue of The Pitch, where we get real messy with a selection of fantastic foods from across the grill spectrum and the stories of our awesome neighbors who concoct such heavenly delights. We hope you enjoy flipping through these sauce-stained pages as much as we loved diving into this year’s crop of ridiculous offerings to the grill gods. We thank you, heavenly hog heaters, for guaranteeing that this city’s flavor palette will never be as “mid” as St. Louis.

Pitch in, and we’ll make it through,