Top Ten Kansas City foods to eat before you die: Number Eight

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By OWEN MORRIS

I have another Kansas City Top Ten list to pass along. This one comes from the constantly inventive blog Venus in the Kitchen. Venus has some great and surprising choices. In fact, she and I share a couple, including my Number Eight selection today.

Martin City was a good 20-minute drive from my childhood home, so my parents rarely took me or my brothers there. When we did go, it meant one of two exciting things: We were going to see a show at the Martin City Melodrama’s original location (I can’t remember a single thing from the various shows, but I do remember that they slayed the nine-year-old me), or we were going to Jack Stack Barbecue.

Back then (for at least part of the time) Fiorella’s Jack Stack was known as Smoke Stack and wasn’t the upscale barbecue behemoth that it is now. When you entered, you were immediately hit by two smokes — barbecue and cigarette.

Like German cars, barbecue was something I did not appreciate until I got older. I was a typical boring kid who preferred sickly sweet sauces (KC Masterpiece). At barbecue joints, I’d order a boring roast beef or turkey sandwich. Jack Stack was the first barbecue place where I bucked that trend. After seeing a couple big plates of cubed beef walk by, I pleaded, begged and cajoled my parents into letting me get something called burnt ends. I like to think my real Kansas City education started that day.

What I l really loved from Jack Stack as a child — and still do today — isn’t the burnt ends, though. It’s not even barbecue, but it is Number Eight on my list of Top Ten Kansas City Foods to Eat Before You Die.