Oklahoma Joe's ribs apparently stick with you. The Daily Meal has just named the pork ribs from OK Joe's the best in the country.
While no other Kansas City joints made the list of 20 barbecue spots, St. Louis has three restaurants in the mix: Bogart's (19), Roper's (18), and Pappy's Smokehouse (8), which led the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to ask if St. Louis was "America's Best Ribs city." Texas can claim bragging rights with six restaurants in the top 20.
For those among us who organize our trips around our dining schedules, Zagat has created a new kind of GPS: the gustatory profile of states. As part of its "50 Plates of America," the dining guide has singled out one food and one restaurant that prepares that dish to represent each state. And locally, that means barbecue.
The ribs of Oklahoma Joe's (which chef Curtis Stone recently called the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of) were picked as the signifier of Kansas, while Arthur Bryant's burnt-end sandwich is the official food of Missouri. If you're planning a road trip, Zagat also recently did a state-by-state guide to coffee shops, and Java Break in Lawrence was the Sunflower State's representative.
Opinionated About Dining is serious about finding the top restaurant in America. The blog and book series started by Steve Plotnicki has produced an annual listing of the top 100 restaurants in the United States since 2008.
The results for 2012, culled together from more than 100,000 reviews and 3,800 people, include a familiar spot to diners in Kansas City: The American Restaurant is ranked 43rd on this year's list. Niche in St. Louis, at 71, is the only other area restaurant to be included.
If anybody knows hot fat, it's Kansas City. But when it came time for Jane and Michael Stern (the authors of Roadfood) to compile their list of America's 50 Best Donuts for Saveur, Kansas City didn't make the cut. Adding fuel to the rivalry is that Donut Stop in St. Louis was the only entry for Missouri. Here's what the Sterns had to say about the Mound City institution:
It may look like a gas station, but regulars know this St. Louis standby for its holeless "cinnamon globs," which deliver butter and spice richness in a generous coat of sugar.
The Midwest on the whole (no pun intended) didn't fare well, and Kansas doesn't have a single doughnut entry. The Sterns missed out on shops like Fluffy Fresh, which yesterday dyed all of its doughnuts green for St. Patrick's Day.
It's like KC Wolf somehow got behind the wheel of a train.
Next stop, America, is Fritz's Railroad. Maximcranked out a list of the five most unique culinary experiences in the United States, and sitting at No. 5 is the Kansas City, Kansas, diner that delivers your food in a train car.
There was Dans Le Noir in New York City for dining in the dark, Bors Hede Inne in Carnation, Washington, for an authentic medieval dining experience, Moto in Chicago for culinary gastronomy, and Ghetto Gourmet for bringing a gourmet chef to cook food in your house. And then the restaurant that you likely haven't been to unless you have a 5-year-old in tow or were 5 yourself.
You may not always eat snapper, but when you do, you probably prefer that it's actually snapper. There's good news out of the recent rash of articles concerning the mislabeling of seafood. While the rest of America is apparently eating rockfish, pollock, tilapia and a whole ocean of other fish that are not red snapper, Kansas Citians are getting the real McCoy.
A new report from Oceana shows that 87 percent of snapper was mislabeled, except in Kansas City, which as PopScinoted, is "one of the only locations where a fish labeled snapper was actually a snapper." A survey of restaurants, grocery stores and sushi venues on both sides of the state line, however, did find that 35 percent of fish wasn't labeled correctly, with escolar being sold as white tuna and Atlantic cod said to be orange roughy.
If you ever needed convincing about the quality of life in the Kansas City area, consider the following fact. Cafe Provence, which Zagat deemed the best service in Kansas City (bear in mind, it's in Prairie Village), is also the cheapest on a list of the restaurants with the finest service in 25 cities. [It was deemed The Pitch's Best Date Night restaurant in 2012, as well.]
Zagat notes that the average ticket is $37 at the French bistro (back in 2010, Fat City's Charles Ferruzza wrote an ode to the curried chicken salad) as compared with $145 at Menton in Boston or $164 at Next in Chicago. A meal at Anthony's in St. Louis will run you $55, and Moro's Dining in the Detroit Area costs $40. Consider this the No. 11 reason to live in Kansas City.
I didn't want to believe this story when I first read it in The Consumerist. A restaurant server says he got stiffed by a church pastor, who wrote on the receipt: "I give God 10 percent. Why do you get 18?" The diner wrote "pastor" over his signature. To absolve his sin, perhaps?
The waitress who posted the receipt was not the waitress stiffed that night. She thought the comment on the receipt was funny and snapped a photo of it, which she posted on Reddit. She was later fired by her employer, a franchise restaurant in the Kansas City-based Applebee's chain.
Consider it an audition for your wedding or next party, but Bake Magazine's Web-based Cake Show (the Search for America's Best Cake Decorator) has just posted the first part of the episode it filmed in Kansas City. The baking show is a challenge in three parts: cupcake decorating, quarter sheet cake decorating and tiered cake creations.
In the first segment, you get to meet the Kansas City contestants following a riveting commercial from Cake Boss Buddy Valastro. The KC bakers vying for the crown are Leighana Williams from 3 Women and an Oven, Carey Iennacaro (who owns Sprinkled With Sugar), Stephanie Dillon from the Hy-Vee in Belton, Missouri, and Sherrie Ortiz of Sherrie's Cake Magic. After that, it's all fondant and piping flowers. In the coming weeks, the challenges should be added to the site with one of the four women being named the best cake decorator in Kansas City.
Where else are you going to get a sundae, tacos, soup and salad?
Lobster tails and a salad bar - it's as luxurious as a refrigerator with a built-in ice machine. But for now, it's still a dream for Kansas City. Sizzler keeps cranking out press releases that suggest that Kansas City is one of its target expansion markets. And time keeps passing in the interim.
The latest release suggests that they plan to open 40 more restaurants in the next five years (think of the cows and crabs we could be eating), but Sizzler has yet to say where KC falls on that five-year continuum. We did this dance in 2012 (when Blue Springs, Gladstone, Independence, Lee's Summit, Liberty, Olathe and Overland Park were all apparently on the table). And here we are again. The genius of the plan is that they've already got our money; we just don't know it yet. Because when Sizzler does come, that's exactly where we'll celebrate.
Kansas House ignores Brownback, Senate, goes home early for long weekend
Royals fan sprints on the field, steals rosin bag
Oklahoma Joe's ribs named the best in the country by The Daily Meal
Soundgarden's sludgy sound, last night at the Midland (review)
Story celebrates with a pig roast and other weekend possibilities
Homer's Drive-In: the oldest drive-through in the metro
KCPD will breathalyze patrons at Tanner's tonight
Don't mess with the Army, feds remind two local businesspeople