Cue Card

FAVORITE SPOTS

Coffee: I get a lot of coffee to go, but if I’m able to slow down, I enjoy Mildred’s. On the run, I like to stop by Oddly Correct and grab a coffee and a sausage biscuit with pimento cheese.

Quick Bite: Definitely Kitty’s Cafe for the pork tenderloin sandwich. Can’t go wrong. I still enjoy eating tacos on my days off, though. Tacos El Viejon is my favorite taco truck. The best stuff to get there are the tripas and al pastor tacos. I love that they have the trompo right in the front window.

Fancy Dinner: I recently went to Novel and I really enjoyed that experience. I think they’re making the best food in Kansas City right now as far as what I’ve tried. Every plate had its own identity. There was nothing on the plate that didn’t need to be there. I feel like some places want to include an ingredient just to have it or add a garnish that isn’t necessary. Every single piece of food that they served us there made sense and added to the dish. I was really impressed.

Determined to enter the food industry, Raya decided that a food cart was the most lowrisk investment. As a Mexican American, he gravitated toward tacos as the foundation for the concept. For several years, Raya juggled his full-time job and the taco cart, slinging tacos at local breweries during the week and slowly building a following. He was offering the birria taco at the Tank before it was trendy.

“Obviously, our birria tacos are a customer favorite,” he says. “Personally, I really like our carnitas. We make it in a traditional way, cooking it in its own fat. We include spices, citrus

TANK’S ROLLING

Roman Raya describes his perfect day in KC.

BY TYLER SHANE

ROMAN RAYA’S FIRST JOB was working at a taco stand at the I-70 racetrack in Odessa, Missouri, when he was sixteen years old. Little did he know he was getting a taste of his future project, Taco Tank. Raya didn’t take a straight path to specializing in the traditional Mexican food, however. He began his corporate career as a document prep specialist at a bank. “Basically, I pulled out staples and paperclips from boxes so our imaging people could scan documents,” he says. “I worked my way up as a tax department manager working with real estate taxes.” and caramel—just a very traditional way of cooking it. That’s something I grew up with my whole life. Carnitas are, to me, a Sunday at my grandma’s house.” For Raya, creating a family-oriented business makes the hustle of the food industry worth it. “Being able to not only create jobs, but create jobs that support my family, our background and our mission, that’s really important to me,” Raya says. Taco Tank has two locations: one at Iron District in North Kansas City and another at Parlor food hall in the Crossroads. The menu pays homage to traditional techniques, but every Tank taco is thoughtfully dressed in its own set of ingredients. For example, the adobo chicken tacos are seared with a layer of crispy cheese, then finished with chihuahua cheese, cilantro and a secret sauce.

DOT REDUX

After a year, Wyandot II returns with long lines and little changed.

BY MARTIN CIZMAR

PHOTOGRAPHY BY COURTNEY COBBS UBSTITUTE TEACHING IS one of society’s most notoriously unpleasant professions. For Ron Williams II, it was a relaxed way to give a little back to society as he was cooling his heels over the last year. Williams has spent his adult life working seven days a week most weeks, typically starting at 4:30 am, when he drives from Piper, Kansas, all the way to Overland Park to light the fires at his family’s barbecue pit, Wyandot BBQ. That all changed on December 3 of 2021 when a fire started in the kitchen at Wyandot II on 75th Street. “One of the guys was pulling brisket out of the oven—it was a real windy day that day, kinda warm—and the wind just pushed the fire out of the box and he couldn’t handle it,” Williams says. “It spread pretty quick and burned our kitchen up pretty good.”’

It took almost a year of haggling with the insurance company and overseeing renovations to reopen Wyandot II. During that time, Williams needed something to do, so he started picking up shifts at the Turner school district in KCK.

“After working seven days a week, you would think a little break would be great, but man, three months in I was just like, ‘I can’t just sit around,’” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna give something back. They need help, I’ll go help ‘em.’”

That get-er-done approach is exactly what you’d expect from the scion of Wyandot BBQ. It’s a place with unfussy ’cue: The ribs aren’t trimmed much, there’s only one sauce, and everything has plenty of smoke from a brick pit that was designed and built by the elder Ron Williams. It’s got a rotisserie with six pans for meat, and it’s entirely fired by wood—Williams prefers a mix of red oak and hickory.

There was no thought given to the idea of closing the location, Williams says. The day after the fire, he was back on site making plans to reopen.

“As soon as I got out of college, I started working for my dad and came over here,” he says. “That’s all my family’s done is the barbecue business. My dad, he doesn’t even have a computer. He’s old school and he just wants to keep it the way he made it. And that’s just how it is.”

Wyandot is emblematic of an earlier era of KC ’cue, with a catsup-based sauce, white bread and massive portions. It’s how it was when the elder Williams struck out on his own after starting in the business at Rosedale.

“It’s nothing fancy,” Williams says. “It’s almost kind of rugged and rough. We’ve never changed our food. It’s pretty much the exact same thing. We’ve added things here and there. Portions are the same size—we don’t really skimp on those.”

Wyandot II had a line wrapped around the building when it returned the Saturday after Thanksgiving and still had dozens waiting for lunch when I visited two weeks later. Loyal customers found that the whole staff had returned, save one employee who sadly passed during the year off. The brick pit remained in good shape. They had to reline the flue, but otherwise the fire “didn’t hurt it too much,” Williams says. “One of the things that’s most important to us is the real wood—we’re not using gas ovens and all that stuff,” Williams says. “We believe it’s real cooking with real wood.”

And that pit still needs to be lit hours before dawn, which means Williams is back to hitting the road at 4:30 am—a change from his 6 am wake-up time when he was substitute teaching. “Oh yeah, that was nothing, man,” Williams says with a laugh.

FRENCH TROPICS

Westport’s French cafe goes tiki-adjacent with a new cocktail, the Yellow Datsun.

BY MEGAN FOLMSBEE

BRULEED SUGAR AND SPICES marry with a fluffy egg white on a pineapple rum-base in one of Westport Cafe’s latest cocktail creations. As his first order of business, new bar manager Andy Weathers composed a funkified list of classic provisions for the winter season and with it, an unexpected tiki-adjacent beverage hit the menu.

The Yellow Datsun combines classic punchy summertime flavors with grounding winter tastes like Weathers’ from-scratch turmeric falernum. Tiki-adjacent cocktails seem to be an emerging trend: The city’s best restaurant, Corvino, did something similar for their New Year’s Eve party, a tropical-themed event they called Corvino Cove.

The turmeric falernum is the standout in Weathers’ opinion. He’s taking over a post that has historically been a launchpad for the city’s mixologists, including Bronson Kistler of milk punch fame.

“Falernum is a very common ingredient in tropical cocktails, usually focusing on ginger, lime zest, almond, baking spices and a bit of overproof spirit,” Weathers says. “My version focused on turmeric’s earthy, spicy and slightly bitter notes, which also gave the falernum a beautiful yellow glow.”

Before Westport, Weathers worked at Town Company downtown. “Westport Cafe has such a history of great bartenders and managers alike,” he says. “My goal is to carry on the tradition while focusing on a modern approach, with a focus on French spirits.”

The Yellow Datsun is one of several drinks with a touch of tiki on Weathers’ new menu—blue curacao, demerara and dark rum also make cameos. The Yellow Datsun is the standout. It’s just tiki enough to intrigue the less-adventurous bar guest while still providing a tart classic that’s not unlike a Capri Sun.