Sylvie Hogg Murphy - Food Lovers Guide to® Kansas City: The Best Restaurants, Markets & Local Culinary Offerings

FOOD LOVERS

G U I D E T O

KANSAS CITY

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Editor: Amy Lyons

Project Editor: Lynn Zelem

Layout Artist: Mary Ballachino

Text Design: Sheryl Kober

Illustrations Jill Butler with additional art by Carleen Moira Powell

Maps: Design Maps Inc. Morris Book Publishing, LLC

ISBN 978-0-7627-7028-1

Printed in the United States of America

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Food Lovers Guide to Kansas City is dedicated to my little boy, Quint, connoisseur of steak and rum cakes.

An expert on restaurants, hotels, sights, and culture, Sylvie Hogg Murphy has been writing travel guides for more than a decade. She is the author of Frommers Rome Day by Day and Frommers Italian Islands, coauthor of Frommers Italy Day by Day and Frommers 500 Islands, and she received a Lowell Thomas award from the Society of American Travel Writers for her work on MTV Italy. She has also written online guides and audioguides for several destinations in Europe and the United States. After living in California, Rome, and New York City, Sylvie now resides in Kansas City, where she is a freelance writer, Italian teacher, home chef, journeyman gardener, and head-over-heels-in-love mom to her little boy, Quint.

My heartfelt gratitude goes out to the innumerable talented, warm, and generous chefs, owners, servers, growers, producers, and fellow food lovers I met during the course of researching this book. Many of them have become my extended foodie familyyou know who you areand I would like to thank them all for the spirited conversations we shared, the insider tips and foodie leads they were kind enough to pass along, and of course for the quality and passion they put into their edibles and potables.

On a personal level, I am grateful to my in-laws, Susy and Tim Murphy, indefatigable and loving grandparents to my son, and without whose generous dedication to childcare almost none of my researching and writing would have been possible. And to my husband, Timmy, for accompanying me on so many epicurean errands around town, and for being such a wise and witty sounding board as I narrowed down my selections for this book.

(I do not wish to thank the burglars who, halfway through this project, broke into my house and stole my computer and with it an earlier version of this manuscript.)

Finally, huge thanks to my editor for all her patience and cooperation. Youre a gem, Amy Lyons.

I was living in the West Village of Manhattan when, out of the blue, I met the love of my life and future husbanda born-and-raised Kansas Citianat a wedding in Puerto Rico. After a year of long-distance dating, I took the plunge and moved from the Big Apple to Cowtown. How does this love story relate to a book for food lovers?

In New York, I had had the extremely good fortune to be a frequent dining companion of the restaurant critic for the New York Times. At some of the most sought-after tables in the world, I ate food prepared by some of the countrys most ambitious and acclaimed chefs. Hardly a week passed when I wasnt gulping down foie gras, truffles, or shiatsu-massaged sashimi on the Timess dime. Manhattan, of course, is also the hungry urbanites paradise where you can get any kind of food, at any hour of the day, delivered to your apartment. Before I lived in New York, I spent five years in Italy, where I still travel frequently as a guidebook writer. The Italian art of making masterpieces out of a few select, fresh, local ingredients is well-known, whether its a cheap pizza napoletana or a Tuscan bean soup or an expensive seafood entree. But eating out in Italy was only part of it for me: Zipping around Rome on my scooter, stopping at street markets and specialty stores for the best tomatoes, artichokes, arugula, clams, fresh mozzarella, pancetta, or focaccia was part of my daily rhythmand I certainly didnt consider myself a gourmet cook. Properly made cappuccino, perfect espresso, and good-quality, affordable wine, too, were a given. In between all that, I came home to visit my family in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Napa Valleythe very cradle of foodie civilization in the United States. What I mean to say with all of the above is that for the best part of a decade, and without really meaning to, Id been living a decadent epicurean lifestylea freewheeling food lovers version of Studio 54. Lo and behold, my privileged eating habits and exposure to the finest ingredients and suavest preparations had made me an accidental food snob.

So when I moved to Kansas City and looked around and sawapart from BBQ places that I immediately fell in love witha lot of boring but busy national chains, sad-looking Chinese buffets that apparently offered the only exotic cuisine available, and about 8,000 identical sports bars serving the same Sysco-supplied chicken fingers to Jayhawks and Chiefs fans, I was underwhelmed. Dont get me wrong, I have a lot of love for the canonical cooking of K.C.BBQ, steak, and just about any form of meatbut I brought with me some major bias about the food scene here, and on the surface of things, that bias appeared to be grounded in reality.

But as I got to know the city better, and especially during the structured task of conducting research for this book, I found my eyes widening and my mouth watering more and more every day. New York and Napa, eat your heart out: There are some amazing food finds here.

It has been an immense pleasure seeking out, or stumbling upon accidentally, all the foodie treasures strewn about Kansas City. It has also been an immense pleasure, now that I have a house, kitchen, and lifestyle that can accommodate much more of my own cooking than I ever did in Italy or New York, to ransack K.C.s best local markets, delis, wine stores, butchers, and bakeriesalmost as I did on my scooter in Rome, but with a lot more trunk spaceand plan menus for my family at home.