A Moveable Feast
Story and photographs by Louis Jacobson
In Kansas City, Old-Fashioned Barbecue Is Thriving
KANSAS CITY--Some cities are known for their skyscrapers, others for
their monuments, still others for their natural scenery. Kansas City has few
of these attributes. Instead, when people come to Kansas City, they come to
experience the world capital of barbecue.
"We get our identity from a culture of food," explains Shifra Stein,
the
author of *All About Bar-B-Q Kansas City Style*. "People will travel across
state lines and into so-called bad neighborhoods. It's not something
nouveau. What you see is what you get."
Barbecue--a word of disputed etymology--is to its aficionados a noun, not
a verb; it refers to pork or beef smoked slowly at a relatively low
temperature. That technique makes barbecue distinct from grilling (which
cooks such items as steaks, hamburgers, fish or chicken during a short
period of intense heat) and from cold-smoking (in which hams and other meats
are hung at several feet's distance from smoking coals or embers). When done
right, the slower cooking process produces softer, more succulent morsels of
meat than other processes do; naturally, practitioners jealously guard their
specific techniques, though many sell their own pre-bottled sauces to a
burgeoning market.
While the earliest barbecuers were probably prehistoric humans, the
cuisine reached its apogee in the American South. According to barbecue
scholar Laura Dove, the pre-Civil War South was highly dependent on pig
farming because swine were easy to raise. A single slow-roasted pig could
serve a large number of people, so as time went on, plantations, small
towns, churches and politicians began sponsoring public barbecues. Such
events, she says, crossed lines of class and race--a rarity at the time.
In fact, race and class have long shaped barbecue history. Restaurants
began appearing in the twentieth century, as "pit men"--the people who
tended slow cookers, sometimes as a weekend diversion from farming--sold
meals to take away. (The meat often consisted of cheaper cuts, which only
became tender after being cooked slowly.) While affluent Americans have
always enjoyed barbecue, the main practitioners were typically blue-collar,
and in many cases African American. In Kansas City, as elsewhere, barbecue
offered African-American entrepreneurs a major route to financial success.
As racial tensions grew during the 1950s and 1960s, barbecue
restaurants--especially those in the South--became increasingly segregated.
But that division has eased noticeably in recent decades. In present-day
Kansas City, the best-known barbecue restaurants--many, though not all, of
which remain in black hands--are among the city's most consistently
integrated places, with suited office workers of both races mixing with
equally integrated groups of working-class customers.
As settlers of the American frontier traveled westward, regional
variations in their barbecue styles emerged--everything from the woods used
to cook with to the sauces to the use of dry spice rubs or marinades before
cooking. In the Carolinas, the easternmost outpost of barbecue, the dish
typically consists of chopped pork with a vinegary sauce. As barbecue moved
west and south, the sauce became increasingly tomato-based.
By the time barbecue reached Memphis, Tennessee, it was enhanced by the
greater diversity of spices available to the residents of a major
Mississippi River port city. In greater Memphis today, pulled pork (that is,
soft, shredded threads of meat) is typically topped by a sweet tomato sauce
spiced by pepper and molasses. Further to the southwest, Texans experimented
with barbecue techniques--only in their case, with the state's major
agricultural product, beef.
Kansas City--a metropolis located half way between the plains of Texas
and Memphis's cotton plantations--evolved into a melting pot, offering both
Texas-style beef (such as brisket) as well as pork and pork ribs. Also
prepared in Kansas City, although less commonly, are chicken, sausage and
turkey. Typically, customers order side orders of beans and french fries;
white bread, used to make impromptu sandwiches, is de rigeur.
At any given time, Kansas City--with a metropolitan population of 1.7
million--boasts between 80 and 100 barbecue restaurants. Some are upscale:
KC Masterpiece, has proven so popular that it has opened branches in several
other big cities and turned its sauce into a major national seller, while
Jack Stack Barbecue of suburban Martin City, Missouri, serves their smoked
meats amid a quiet, Victorian setting. Others restaurants are more humble.
Lil' Jake's Eat It & Beat in downtown K.C. it has only a tiny sit-down area,
while Gates Bar-B-Q moves customers through quickly and brusquely with a
minimum of embellishment.
The K.C. restaurant scene also has vaunted neighborhood institutions,
such as Marty's, where owner Jean Tamburello has served three generations of
the same family. But it also boasts low-profile restaurants that regularly
fade into and out of business. A barbecue joint can be as simple as a smoker
set up temporarily in a parking lot. In fact, "follow the smoke" is
common
advice for finding a restaurant. "It's a hard market because of the
competition," says author Stein. "Because of that, you'd better be
damned
good."
Not surprisingly, restaurant adventuring is a popular pastime in Kansas
City. Consider a two-year-old group called G.A.S. BBQ (which stands,
cheekily, for "Gastronomic Appreciation Society"). The group--roughly
30 men
and a few women--visits a new barbecue restaurant every month, then writes
an irreverent review of the outing and posts it on their website
(www.jccc.net/~rmoehrin/gas.htm). The group has attracted something of
a cult following. "Our candor became a drawing card," says founder
Rick
Moehring, a counselor at Johnson County Community College in suburban
Kansas. "We're really in search of 'dives.'"
When your correspondent arrived in town, he joined eight G.A.S. BBQ
members for a progressive barbecue dinner--six restaurants in roughly 3
hours. It was exhausting and messy (finding napkins and plastic forks proved
to be a challenge) but it wasn't expensive. Each participant chipped in $10
at the beginning of the night; by the end, after countless rib slabs, smoked
briskets and potato wedges, the kitty still had money left in it.
The tour illustrated the sheer diversity of Kansas City barbecue
restaurants. B.B.'s Lawn Side Bar-B.Q. is done up in roadhouse style,
featuring ribs and live music. Laura's Bar-B-Q N Stuff is an obscure,
inner-city carry-out that offers spicy sauce and sweet tea cakes. L.C.'s is
a bustling, triangular-shaped restaurant with french fries
"thrice-fried" in
lard and a soot-covered, rib-filled smoker behind the counter.
At Arthur Bryant's Barbecue--famously called "the best restaurant on the
planet" by humorist Calvin Trillin--employees serve the restaurant's
signature moist brisket without the benefit of gloves or tongs (the primary
exception coming in 1937, when Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia insisted
upon special treatment). Rosedale Barbeque looks something like an
old-fashioned diner, while Oklahoma Joe's shares a roof and four walls with
a gas station-liquor store complex.
In Kansas City, as in every American city, the population has shifted
decisively towards the suburbs during the past two decades, and barbecue
restaurants have been no exception. Yet even though the older, downtown
restaurants are usually grimier--and though their neighborhoods are not
always safe at night--the shortage of fancy amenities has become a draw in
and of itself. "Where it's highly refined, you get more suspicious,"
Moehring says. "We're more willing to take our chances with bacteria."
The alternative, of course, is to cook barbecue oneself--an option that
is proving increasingly attractive to Kansas City natives and outsiders
alike. With a supply of hardwood briquettes and an adequate amount of trial
and error, amateurs can use a simple Weber grill--an item readily available
for about $80--to get excellent results, says Ardie Davis, a leading
backyard barbecuer and author in Kansas City. But in an ironic twist from
the days when barbecue was exemplified by cheap cuts of meat and oil drums
recycled into smokers, barbecue has recently gone upscale in a big way.
Karen Adler, the founder of Pig Out Publications, a barbecue-book
publisher, says the offerings at trade shows have recently leaped off the
charts. "Two years ago, the high-end grills were $5,000 or $6,000,"
Adler
says. "This past year the top of the line was $10,000." The booming
American
economy is one reason, as is the trend toward the consumption of finer
foods. But the biggest factor is probably the barbecue contest circuit.
Nationally, several organizations sanction barbecue contests, but in
Kansas City, the best known is the Kansas City Barbeque Society, which was
founded in 1985 and now includes 2,500 members in all 50 states and 11
countries. Every year, the society oversees about 80 juried events that
attract millions of visitors. (Ironically, some states bar the public from
sampling contestants' food because of public-health regulations.)
The KCBS allows any equipment except for gas or electric cookers. "There
were contests before we arrived, but they each had different ways of doing
it," says society president Gary Wells. "But the cookers wanted
something
more formalized, so they would know what they're up against." Contestants
who do well enough in regional battles are asked to participate in major
invitational events such as the Jack Daniels Invitational in Lynchburg,
Tenn., or the American Royal/K.C. Masterpiece International Invitational
Barbecue Contest in Kansas City.
Many events feature hundreds of contestants from the tight-knit barbecue
community. But participating can be expensive--and few contestants ever
manage to defray their expenses by winning prize money. Beyond the requisite
hardware, tools, meat and entry fees are the recreational vehicles that many
barbecue teams consider necessary pit-side equipment for the two or three
days of competition.
"People question our sanity," acknowledges Paul Kirk, a caterer,
consultant and teacher of barbecue techniques. "But our comeback to, 'How
can you justify buying an $8,000 pit setup?' is, 'Aren't you the person who
bought a used boat for $18,000 and will burn $300 of gas every time you take
the kids out in it?' For my money, at least I get to eat."
Some barbecue aficionados express dismay that the contests encourage
spiraling costs and over-conformity (to satisfy strict judging standards).
Still, few believe such factors--or, for that matter, a desire for healthier
cuisine--are going to kill off barbecue anytime soon. "Barbecue," says
G.A.S. BBQ member Jeff Anderson, "is bigger than all of us."
