Top Ten Kansas City Foods To Eat Before You Die: Number 10

By OWEN MORRIS

“Foods to eat before you die” has become a popular Internet meme. Two of our sister blogs Fork in The Road from Village Voice and Eating our Words from Houston Press put their own spin on it, so I have decided to do the same for Kansas City. This list is my own and purely subjective. I chose what I did for a variety of different reasons. If you don’t like it, send me your own list or put one in the comments. I’m counting backwards and today is my Number 10 Kansas City food to eat before I die.

Number 10: Lamar’s Cinnamon Twist

This listing is based purely on nostalgia but hey, that’s a big part of what food is about. I am just old enough to remember driving to the inner city with dad in our (even then) old Volvo station wagon. Driving to the city meant that my dad was going either to a junkyard or to get some food. The junkyards I never cared much for, but the food always excited me. And nowhere moreso than LaMar’s Doughnuts.

While LaMar’s is now a franchise with many locations in various states (its headquarters are sadly no longer in Kansas City but in Lincoln, Nebraska) at the time there was only the one store and even as a four- or five-year-old I could tell it wasn’t very nice aesthetically. Fortunately, I was too young to know anything of cleanliness. Not that any of that mattered anyways.