Pizza Issue: March 2022

An Economist Breaks Down the Cerner Sale

P 43

BEST PIES & SLICES HALF ARE NEW!

Devoured PAGE 62

Is Fibroblasting the New Botox?

Z A Z I

New Local True Crime: An Excerpt from Ripple

LO CA L P IZZA IS HAV IN G A RENA IS SA NC E

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Through great storytelling, photography and design, we help our readers celebrate our city’s triumphs, tend to its faults and revel in the things that make it unique.

PUBLISHER

Kathy Boos kathy@kansascitymag.com EDITOR IN CHIEF

Martin Cizmar martin@kansascitymag.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Mary Henn mary@kansascitymag.com ART DIRECTOR

Katie Henrichs katie@kansascitymag.com ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR

Makalah Hardy makalah@kansascitymag.com GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Kayla Masisak

DESIGN INTERN

Natalea Bonjour

COPY EDITOR

Kelsie Schrader WEB COORDINATOR

Madison Russell SALES

Angie Henshaw angie@kansascitymag.com WRITERS

Dawnya Bartsch, Nina Cherry, Lauren Fox, Natalie Torres Gallagher, Nicole Kinning, Danielle Lehman, Patrick Moore, Patrick Mulvihill, Hampton Stevens PHOTOGRAPHERS & ILLUSTRATORS

Jacqueline Ayala, Zach Bauman, Shawn Brackbill, Caleb Condit, Joanna Gorham, Jeremey Theron Kirby, Samantha Levi, Rebecca Norden, Anna Petrow, Baleigh Thompson

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

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MARCH 2022

48 PRIZED PIES

42

66

88

Woody Reverie

Strange Search

Westport Roundup

A home in Parkville gets a modern and sustainable update, making it a family sanctuary.

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

Pages from a new book about a local man’s murder in a backwater town

Our food critic reviews three new Westport spots.

PHOTOGRAPHY OF 1889 BY ZACH BAUMAN

We scoured the city for the 43 best pies and slices

In This Issue MARCH 2022

S WAY

37

T H E LO O P

17

Crossing Over

TA S T E

Leaf Lips

A local planter makes pots from cermic lips and takeout boxes.

87

A local economist breaks down changes silently shaping the KC economy.

38

The New Botox

88

Hair Haven

90

What you need to know about fibroblasting and permanent makeup

40 42 Emotional Tsunami

Two mental health experts discuss how to help children and parents face the emotional trauma of the pandemic.

A celebrity hairstylist and KC native opens a new salon in the River Market.

Sustainable Shelter

A home in wooded Parkville achieves a sleek and sustainable design.

22

E V E RY I S S U E

12

Editor’s Letter

25 Calendar 30 Backbeat An Economist Breaks Down the Cerner Sale

Is Fibroblasting the New Botox?

03.2022 THE PIZZA ISSUE | RIPPLE

ZA PIZ 43

BEST PIES & SLICES HALF ARE NEW!

New Local True Crime: An Excerpt from Ripple

LO C A L P I Z Z A I S HAV I N G A R E NA I S SA N C E

94 Scene O N TH E C OVE R

Photography of Devoured

by Zach Bauman

96 Surreal Estate SPECIAL SECTIONS

kansascitymag.com

31

Outdoor Living Guide

Devoured PAGE 62

10

Prime Time

The brand-new Ocean Prime has a hearty tuna tartare.

72 Camp Guide

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

Wild, Wild Westport

Three new restaurants in KC’s oldest nieghborhood

92 93

Hot Oil

James Chang talks about Waldo Thai and his chili oil venture.

Gin-ius

One of the state’s best distilleries makes seasonal gin.

Newsfeed

The latest in KC food news

FROM THE EDITOR

C O N T R I B U TO R S

Zach Bauman

PHOTOGRAPHER

Most of our pizza feature was shot by Zach Bauman, one of the city’s most prolific food photographers. Zach, a dedicated pizza geek, also helped our team pick the spots included.

Anna Petrow

PHOTOGRAPHER

One other photo in the pizza feature comes from Anna Petrow, also an established KC food photographer.

Petrow’s moody shots of St. Louis pizza were snapped while sampling pies with her pro-Provel husband, who wrote the piece.

Lauren Fox WRITER

This month’s profile of an Irish singer from Lawrence was written

by Lauren Fox, a Notre Dame grad who is the second most-Irish writer on our masthead.

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOANNA GORHAM

E

very Sunday—rain or shine or whiteout blizzard from Hateful Eight—I make pizzas in my backyard. It’s a tradition I started during the pandemic, but it’s also something I grew up with.

Every Sunday, my mom would have three dough balls covered in olive oil sitting out to rise on browned and battered aluminum pans. It goes back further than that. I’m a quarter Calabrian and my father grew up in Brier Hill, the Italian neighborhood in Youngstown, Ohio. As a boy, he would take my grandmother’s pies (like others in the neighborhood, she made a distinctive red-topped style with peppers boiled in Sunday sauce and just a sprinkle of Romano) down the block to the wood-fired community pizza oven.

All of that is a long way of saying, with apologies to cousin Mike, this issue isn’t just business for me—it’s personal.

I’m extremely passionate about pizza. I’ve made pilgrimages to many of the nation’s best, from Patsy’s of Harlem to Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Buddy’s in Detroit, Flour + Water in San Francisco and Cosa Buona in LA. I lived by Bianco, Apizza Scholls and Ken’s Artisan, and I’m blessed to get a little feedback on my backyard pies from Ken Forkish’s recipe tester/copyeditor.

So trust me when I say: Kansas City is currently having a pizza renaissance.

When we started working on this issue, I had a conversation with Zach Bauman, the trusty local photographer who shot this month’s pizza package.

Zach is a fellow pizza geek and Ooni owner.

“I’m surprised you’re doing this—is Kansas City’s pizza game strong enough?” he said to me.

So Zach and I started talking about our long list, which includes a lot of new places. We both came away marveling at all the great new pizza projects in the city— like the pie from the Devoured pop-up’s Jhy Coulter on our cover (page 62).

I ate that pizza (literally, the one in the photo) and, as someone who makes pies every Sunday, left humbled. Watching Coulter effortlessly and intuitively work her dough before firing that pie in a consumer pizza oven like my own, and then tasting the result, showed me just how far I am from greatness. After a few days of quiet reflection on my inadequacies, I have recommitted myself to the cause—for my grandmother, for my daughter.

As I said, we are witnessing a renaissance in KC pizza. No matter what style of pizza you prefer, and no matter how high your standards, there’s now a pie in this city that’s Martin Cizmar EDITOR IN CHIEF going to leave you dazzled. We’re excited to MARTIN@KANSASCITYMAG.COM play consigliere starting on page 48.

We catch what others miss.

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NUMBERS FROM THIS ISSUE

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The type of flour used in Kansas City’s best New York-style pizza.

PA GE 52

9

Albums of Celtic-adjacent music that local singersongwriter Ashley Davis has made in her career.

PA GE 2 8

5,500 Gallons of water pumped per minute by the Northland’s Children’s Fountain, the “largest fountain of its kind in America.”

PA GE 96

THIN AIR

Last month, our cover story focused on the disappearance of Angela Green, a woman who went missing from Prairie Village during the summer of 2019.

Her daughter, Ellie Green, and niece, Michelle Guo, continue to search for answers. The general response to our coverage of Angela’s case was a mix of fascination and heartbreak. Most wanted to know how a mother could vanish from a suburb in Kansas without a trace, and almost everyone who weighed in expressed sympathy toward Ellie and Angela’s family.

The Prairie Village Police Department wrote to us regarding Angela’s case, too—specifically, Kansas City’s Only Podcast’s discussion of the case. The PVPD defended the thoroughness of their investigation, including their use of crime scene equipment and technology.

This is such a fascinating but heartbreaking story. I hope her daughter gets answers soon. —Meredith Holland Thompson Please help this family find answers. —Shay Nikole I’m happy to see continued coverage on this case. Hoping for some closure for her daughter, Ellie. —@aykui777 I have been following this story for a little over a year and I too want answers for Ellie!

She deserves to know what happened to her mother.

—@dopamean01 During the podcast, the Police Department was mocked for spending a lot of unnecessary time to see if Angela Green went to China. I would

“

argue that this is a testament to the thoroughness of our investigation. A second statement was made regarding the thoroughness of searching properties for evidence and not using cadaver dogs. The Johnson County Crime Lab was on scene during the search warrants and used equipment and technology far more reliable and effective than what could have been provided by cadaver dogs. I do thank you for taking the time to run this story and trying to bring attention to this case. The public’s help is always appreciated and, in many ways, needed in order to solve these types of cases. —Chief of Police Byron K. Roberson & Captain Brady Sullivan

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

BEHIND THE SCENES

Art Director Katie Henrichs dangles a rocketship air plant holder from rOOTS while photographer Samantha Levi captures the perfect shot.

CONTACT US

Kansas City

P.O. Box 26823 Overland Park, KS 66225-6823 (913) 469-6700 EMAIL: editor@kansascitymag.com

I just started going HAM. It was stupid, but I really wanted to win. Honestly, I thought those giveaways were a scam.”

—JHY COULTER OF THE DEVOURED PIZZA POP-UP

14

The issue includes an excerpt of Ripple: A Long Strange Search for a Killer, a new book by local author Jim Cosgrove. Big thanks to Cosgrove and his publisher, Steerforth Press.

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NOTHING BUT FLY-OVER COUNTRY.

Some people regard Nebraska as a place you cross on the way to a more interesting place.

But over half a million sandhill cranes might disagree. Every March, they land here for a closer look at things. And flocks of humans swoop in to witness the awesomeness of a crane migration. There are those who will always think our state is strictly for the birds.

But you might disagree, so go to VisitNebraska.com for a free Travel Guide.

And a closer look at one very interesting place.

L E A D I N G T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N I N K A N S A S C I T Y

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEREMEY THERON KIRBY

FLOOD ON THE TRACKS While locals obsessed over the sale of Cerner, an even bigger acquisition was quietly shaping the future of the local economy.

BY M A R T I N C I Z M A R

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

17

TH E LO O P FLOOD ON THE TR ACKS

Tech gets all the ink—a local economist explains bigger changes quietly shaping the KC economy.

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

Kuehl says. “People forget that Kansas City is a huge auto manufacturing town.

They forget about aerospace. They forget about the transportation sector.

Strangely enough, they forget about agribusiness. How do how you forget about agribusiness in the middle of the ag sector? But, you know, we tend to overlook things like that because other stuff seems sexier.”

The sale of Cerner, a homegrown medical records tech company that was acquired by Texas-based Oracle for $28 billion, made headlines for weeks, while the sale of Kansas City Southern, for more money, went under the radar, because, as Kuehl says “it’s a lot less glamorous to be a shipping hub.”

Kansas City—like so many midsized cities—often boasts about loose ties to tech. You’ll often hear local bigwigs refer to the Silicon Prairie, just like bigwigs in other mid-markets who make dubious claims of tech ties using cringey self-applied nicknames like Silicon Forest, Silicon Swamp, Silicon Mesa and (woof) Silicon Holler.

Kuehl, whose opinion we solicited after noting the changing face of retail in Johnson County, says that despite all the gloom about the sale of two

“

Even as we lose some bigger company that’s headquartered here, we pick up six others that are going to have a regional headquarters here.”

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEREMEY THERON KIRBY

L

one of Kansas City’s iconic companies sold for $30 billion after a brief bidding war. It was a homegrown company with thousands of employees which was, in many ways, synonymous with the city but with a footprint that stretches across the country.

No, we’re not talking about Cerner —we’re talking about Kansas City Southern Railroad.

The railroad company, based here since its founding during the Grover Cleveland administration, was bought

by Canadian Pacific for $31 billion.

That news was buried on page six of the Kansas City Star and did not prompt a flurry of tweets from Mayor Quinton Lucas.

It’s a sign of how the discourse around the city’s economy is a bit skewed, according to Chris Kuehl, director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, which provides strategic advice, economic forecasting and business analysis for corporate clients.

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TH E LO O P FLOOD ON THE TR ACKS

“Once it was thought of as being on the block, what was really worrying people was if a competitor bought Cerner,” he says. “That would have been a disaster because they would have moved all the operations to their home headquarters.”

Instead, Oracle, which had no existing products in the category, stepped in. “They’ve just bolted on a whole different business, which means they’re gonna leave it completely alone,” he says. “They didn’t buy Cerner to put them out of business. They bought Cerner to add to their business.”

The strength of the KC economy is its diversity While many cities seem to embrace being known for one dominant industry—steel in Pittsburgh or oil in Dallas—it leaves a place at the mercy of trade winds they can’t reliably predict let alone control. Kansas City has a lot of irons in the fire, which Kuehl views as a good thing.

“We’ve always been a diverse economy,” he says. “We get excited when we lose a Sprint or a Cerner through a merger, but we always tend to forget that we’re a regional headquarters city, and even as we lose some bigger company that’s headquartered here, we pick up six others that are going to have a regional headquarters here.”

While having a national headquar-

20

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

ters is a feather in the cap, having a regional headquarters is better for having a dollar in the pocket.

“The headquarters are frequently here, almost out of a whim—somebody says, ‘Hey, I like it here,’” Kuehl says.

“But with a regional headquarters, you sort of think it through and say, ‘I need something here, I’m always going to need something here.’”

The Cerner sale likely will work out well for KC If Cerner had to be sold, the company that bought it could hardly have been better for KC in Kuehl’s view. Oracle is based in Austin, Texas, and has major operations there, in Nashville and outside San Francisco.

KC is close to its HQ and other operations and also centrally located, which is helpful since Cerner’s employees tend to travel to help sell their system and train new customers.

KC is well-positioned for what’s booming: the warehouse business Kansas City was already the nation’s second-largest rail hub after Chicago.

The Canadian acquisition of Kansas City Southern Railroad will have a huge effect on the city. As a result of the merger, an estimated 800,000 to 2.5 million additional cargo containers per week will come into the middle of the country. “That won’t all come here, but it’s going to be all up and down the I-35 corridor,” Kuehl says. “The big change from a commercial real estate perspective is going to be warehouse and distribution.”

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEREMEY THERON KIRBY

local tech companies, Cerner and Sprint, there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the local economy.

The decline of retail is happening everywhere We originally reached out to Kuehl to ask about the state of commercial real estate near Corporate Woods, around the former Spring campus in the center of Johnson County. The once-vibrant area has seen a lot of businesses leave.

That’s part of a national trend: Retail vacancy rates are at a seven-year high, according to Forbes, with shopping malls accounting for a huge chunk of that. But even the newest shopping plazas now look different, he says.

“Every time you look at a strip mall, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, wonder what store is going in there,’” he says. “There’s no stores. It’s gonna be an imaging center, an urgent care center, a dental center and a pet psychologist. There’s nothing to buy in there.”

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THE LOOP HELP IS HERE

Two local mental health experts wrote a book to help kids and parents navigate the fallout of the pandemic.

BY M A R T I N C I Z M A R

I T C A N B E H A R D T O D E S C R I B E W H AT ’ S G O I N G O N W I T H K I D S , who are now entering the third year of a pandemic that started as a few weeks of changes to their routines “to slow the spread.”

It’s taken a toll, say two Kansas City mental health experts who work with kids: Dr. Caroline Danda, a clinical psychologist, and Carron Montgomery, a licensed professional counselor and registered play therapist.

Given the achingly long waitlists for child psychologists right now, Danda and Montgomery have created a new book called The Invisible Riptide, which aims to help both parents and children navigate “the silent emotional tsunami going on in the world.”

The book tells the story of a young girl who’s feeling anxiety that she doesn’t know how to deal with. The goal is to normalize those emotional experiences and train kids on how to work through them.

The book’s illustrations were done by David Gentile, the retired CEO from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City.

We talked to Montgomery and Danda about the project and how adults can help struggling kids—and themselves—by shifting their mindset on mental health.

How did you get together to work on this project? Montgomery: We knew we had similar approaches and passion for our work. I loved the way she educates, talks to kids, schools and parents. I felt like together we could really spread the word. We passed ideas back and forth, and before we knew it, we were knee-deep in an important collaboration. We fuel one another with our passion and truly write together.

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

You talk about how emotionally intelligent today’s children are, why is that the case? Danda: The younger generation is much more comfortable with their feelings and being able to ask for help. They’ve grown up with more information and focus on feelings through TV, videos and even schools, much like they are more comfortable with technology than the older generation.

There is still a stigma surrounding mental health, and some can still see it as a weakness. What we always tell people is smart people know they don’t know everything, nor do they have to. If you have a problem, you can ask for help. That’s part of the message of The Invisible Riptide. Stella wants answers, and Stella’s mom realizes she doesn’t know all the answers. So they go to see Ms. Tina, who helps Stella understand her feelings so she can move through them.

People often say teachers are having a tough time during the pandemic. What is difficult for them?

Montgomery: Online school also impacted the learning curve, and many students are at very different levels. Kids and teens are also stressed and anxious, which impacts their ability to focus, learn and sit still. Even many high-performing students are so overwhelmed that they become frozen, unmotivated and unable to complete simple tasks.

Teachers are having to break things down more while managing the emotional climate of the classroom.

What’s the biggest thing you hope people take away from the book? Danda: The best thing about The Invisible Riptide is that it normalizes mental health, the mind-body connection and seeking connection and help. Talking creates connection and reduces guilt and shame.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARIANNE KILROY

CHANGING TIDE

You’ve mentioned that the illustrations all have symbolism—why is that important? Montgomery: When dealing with anxiety, you are often dealing with your imagination, so what better way to access feelings than through art and imagination. I wanted the art to offer readers images that were felt on a deeper level. David’s art is the perfect balance of sophistication but is also very approachable and not intimidating. It’s hopeful and inviting—the perfect introduction to mental health that also offers deeper meaning for people who are open to wanting to dive deep.

Metaphors give both adults and children the words they sometimes don’t have or don’t know how to express or make sense of. Metaphors create a safe intro and distance for people to warm up to uncomfortable topics or conversations.

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WHERE YOU WANT TO BE IN MARCH

March

01

GO: The Kansas City Curling Club’s new dedicated ice is at 2525 N.W. S. Outer Road, Blue Springs. Find a class or open ice time at kccurling.com.

IN THE HOUSE

People sometimes ask DeeAnn Moore, the president of the Kansas City Curling Club, if they should plan to bring their own stones, like you would a bowling ball.

It’s a friendly question but one that shows just how little people understand the sport. The answer is definitely not—the forty-pound hunks of smoothed granite come from Alisa Craig, an island off the coast of Scotland, and a set costs thousands of dollars.

Every four years, curling gets a big bump in interest thanks to the Olympic games. It’s easy to understand the appeal for coach-locked spectators. You are definitely never going to fly off a ski jump or land even one axel, but maybe you could slide some rocks down the ice?

For the first time, Kansas Citians are positioned to find out, thanks to the local club’s brand-new facility in Blue Springs. It’s the only dedicated curling ice for more than three hundred miles, and it marks the first time Kansas Citians can actually try curling on dedicated sheets instead of attempting it on a rutted-up skating rink at odd hours. If you’ve dreamed of trying the sport, you can now pay $30 for a ninety-minute class at the club.

Be warned that it’s a little addictive—harder than it looks on TV but easy enough to keep you trying. And if you lose? Well, by tradition, the winner buys your first drink in the warm room overlooking the ice after all the stones are thrown. —MARTIN CIZMAR

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

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W H AT YO U WA N T TO D O T H I S M O N T H

March

T H E B E AT C A L EN DA R

The Thoma Collection March 1-31 The newest exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum is a show featuring fifteen works of artists who worked under Spanish colonial rule in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru in the 1600s and 1700s.

The show, which runs through September 4, has works pulled from the holdings of Chicago’s Thoma Foundation, which has an emphasis on work from the Spanish Americas. Through September 4. Nelson-Atkins Museum.

Sporting KC vs. Houston Dynamo March 5, 2:30 pm Sporting KC’s home opener finds the side facing some familiar foes. Houston’s new head coach is Paulo Nagamura, who won two ’chips as a player at Sporting and has been an assistant for the past five seasons.

Nagamura also poached a number of assistants to fill out his Dynamo staff. Saturday, March 5. 2:30 pm.

Children’s Mercy Park.

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

04

Yvonne Osei's EXTENSIONS, from "Moving in Place"

Moving in Place March 4–19 Charlotte Street’s Moving in Place is a site-specific show that features nine artists and includes performance, video art, sculpture and photography. The show was curated by Kimi Kitada, who gathered pieces in which the artists “use their own bodies as material and vessel for performance-based works.”

The show includes work from artists based in Chicago, New York, L.A. and two locals (Haley Kostas and Johanna Winters), and in each work, the “presence of the body is integral to the realization of each piece.” Opening reception on Friday, March 4, 6–9 pm. Charlotte Street Gallery, 3333 Wyoming St., KCMO. Shows continue through March 19.

Bessie, Billie, & Nina March 6, 7 pm The Winterlude jazz series at JCCC continues with this show, a tribute to Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.

The show has three vocalists fronting an all-female jazz band to pay homage to their legacies. Sunday, March 6. 7pm. Polsky Theatre at Johnson County Community College. $17-35.

The Royale March 8–27 Jack Johnson was the first Black heavyweight champ, an American icon of the early twentieth century. KCRep is staging The Royale, a new work by playwright Marco Ramirez (Orange is the New Black, Daredevil) that shows the human cost of making history. Tuesday, March 8–Sunday, March 27. Various times. Copaken Stage.

Flogging Molly March 11, 8 pm A St. Patrick’s season tradition on par with Chicago turning its river green or undergrads skipping classes to pound green beer, Flogging Molly’s annual spring tour finds the Celtic punk act playing “Drink and Fight” for aged punks who do more of the former than the latter at this stage of their life.

Friday, March 11. 8 pm. The Truman.

St. Patrick’s Day Warm-Up

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY RESPECTIVE VENUES

March 12, 2 pm Back in 2020, the annual Brookside St. Patrick’s Day Warm-Up was one of the first things canceled to “flatten the curve.” This is the third try at celebrating forty years with community groups, drill teams, Irish dancers, bagpipers and the mounted patrol parading down 63rd Street between Main Street and Wornall Road. Saturday, March 12. 2 pm.

Kansas Craft Brewers Expo March 12 Beer festivals are slowly coming back, and that includes the tenth edition of the biggest one in Lawrence: this fest featuring forty breweries at Abe & Jake’s Landing.

It’s your chance to try beers from some of the Sunflower State’s smallest and farthest-flung operations, including Gellas Diner & Liquid Bread Brewing Compa-

11

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs March 11–13

Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple, is as close as modern Americans get to universal deification. That includes an operatic treatment of his life story, to be produced by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. The piece was composed by Mason Bates and librettist Mark Campbell and is making its local premiere. Friday, March 11–Sunday, March 13. Various times. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

ny of Hays, Walnut River of El Dorado and Center Pivot of Quinter (pop. 927). Saturday, March 12. Noon–3 pm and 4:30–7:30 pm. Abe & Jake’s Landing, 8 E. Sixth St., Lawrence. $40. kscraftbrewfest.com.

Just the Two of Us March 12, 8 pm The Kansas City Jazz Orchestra stages a breezy performance of “Just the Two of Us” featuring Grammy-winning saxophonist Kirk Whalum. The show features songs from the genre of contemporary jazz (“Breezin,” “Mister Magic,” and the title cut “Just the Two of Us”) arranged for a jazz orchestra. Saturday, March 12. 8 pm. Helzberg Hall of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

29

Girl in Red March 29, 8 pm

“Serotonin,” the single from Marie Ulven’s alt-pop project Girl in Red, has been a radio juggernaut. On the road for a series of shows that ends with her making her Coachella debut, she’ll play the Truman. The music is “Billie Eilish plays early ’00s college rock,” and Ulven’s got the bedazzled baggy jeans and logoless hoodies to match. Tuesday, March 29. 8 pm. The Truman.

Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros March 15, 7 pm Grateful Dead founder Bob Weir returns to the road for his first full-fledged solo tour since the pandemic, backed by the Wold Bros band and a string and brass quintet called the Wolfpack.

Tuesday, March 15. 7 pm. Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland.

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

27

T H E B E AT LUCK Y CH A R M S

CELTIC CROSSROADS Mondegreens are a muse for Lawrence Celtic musician Ashley Davis.

BY L AU R E N F OX

AS H LEY DAVI S D ESC R I BE S HE RS E LF AS A “ PO RO US ” M US I C I AN. She finds inspiration by hearing people’s stories and the way they verbalize their emotions—a process in which she says she sees a lot of beauty.

A fifth-generation Kansan, Davis lives in Lawrence, where she is currently working on her ninth album, Songs of the Celtic Winter Part 2, which she plans to release in November.

We chatted with Davis about her inspiration, the Irish music scene in Kansas City and a few of her favorite spots around town before her appearance at Lawrence’s Liberty Hall on March 5.

How would you describe your music? I tend to say “world music.” Like any frontier kid, we don’t like boundaries. And so I don’t want to be put into a specific bin because I want to be able to continue to draw from any culture, any genre, and continue to make my music, which is a unique blend of a lot of different things. And though that’s sometimes going against the grain in my own genre of Celtic music, I think it’s what’s given me a unique voice.

How do you come up with your lyrics? When I’m writing and I’m stuck, I will often go to volumes of poetry that I have on hand in my writing room. I usually read about three books at the same time, and I’m always taking notes.

One habit that I have that is interesting as a writer is I will often mishear something that somebody says—maybe at a table beside me—and I’ll think, “That is an amazing way of expressing that,” but it’s incorrect. Or I’ll misread a text, and the misreading ends up

being something really cool.

The other day I was reading a book and it said, “This is also thought of as the”—and what I read was “awkward heart.” I thought, “What a great song title, ‘The awkward heart.’’’ I wrote it down and then came back and reread the sentence, and it actually was “awakened heart.” I do this all the time, and it’s like these little messages that I get. So the first track of the new winter album is called “The Awkward Heart.”

What’s something your fans might not know about you? A lot of people don’t know that I’m a Reiki practitioner and that when I’m not on the road, I see people who would like to be treated with energy work. I get to hear the stories of the people that I treat, and they are always stories of the heart.

They sometimes influence how I might be writing something— because we are all made up of everyone’s stories, in a way.

And your story becomes my story today. I think I am a pretty porous writer and an empath, so I’m always sort of soaking in everybody’s language and energy and ideas.

GO: To find out more

about Ashley Davis, go to ashleydavisband.com.

FAVO R I T E S P OT S

Garazzo’s “The original Garozzo’s in north Kansas City. Mike Garozzo’s a good friend of my dad’s, and we’ve been going there since I was a kid. My mother’s Italian, and it just felt like the experience I had with her Italian side on the East Coast whenever I would go in there. So it would trigger a lot of memories of my Kansas family and her side also.”

Kauffman Stadium “Some of my most formative memories are there. I’ve been going there since I was born and have just incredible family memories of being there. I’m a huge Royals fan.”

28

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHAWN BRACKBILL

Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque “I remember going there as a kid with my dad, and it is my favorite barbeque in the world. It’s the most unique sauce I’ve ever tasted. By far. And I give it as gifts all around the world. I’ll bring a bottle with me in my suitcase.”

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29

B AC K B E AT PL A I N S OU N D

It’s been eight years since saxophonist Stephen Martin released his debut. He learned a lot, and now he’s back with a new album on Origin Records.

By Nina Cherry

E

GO: Thursday evenings, 9-11 pm, Ca Va, 4149 Pennsylvania St., KCMO

30

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CLINT ASHLOCK

STUDIO TWO

IGHT YEARS AFTER HE RECORDED IT, Stephen Martin feels like he’s outgrown his first album.

“You spend so much time trying to get not only your individual sound but the band sound together,” Martin says. “And then you walk into a studio. If you’re new to it, it’s a whole new world to try and figure out. It was a big learning experience for me.”

Martin is a saxophonist who hit the Kansas City scene fourteen years ago, when he started studying with the world-renowned Bobby Watson. After pursuing his master’s degree in St. Louis for two years, Martin returned to KC in 2014, recording his first album shortly after.

It’s been a long wait between albums, but Martin has now been picked up by Origin Records, one of the leading jazz labels, which will release his second album, High Plains.

“There are a lot of lessons I’ve applied to High Plains,” Martin says. “I’m really happy about this progression.”

The hour-long album is composed of four originals, including the title track, and four standards, including a Coltrane-esque take on “Easy Living.”

While his influences and mentors have of course influenced his style, Martin isn’t trying to imitate anyone. Whether he’s soloing on Joe Henderson’s “Punjab” or one of his originals, his effortless phrasing and distinct voice always shine through.

High Plains is down to earth. It’s authentic. It’s personal.

“High Plains goes back to my roots, particularly my memories as a kid living in and driving across Wyoming and studying the mountains in the distance,” Martin says.

Martin is backed up by a killer band on the album, with locals Peter Schlamb on vibraphone and piano and Ben Leifer on bass, plus Omaha-based drummer David Hawkins. But if the musicianship wasn’t already outstanding enough, add in the special guests, two of Martin’s longtime mentors, saxophonists Bobby Watson and Matt Otto. Watson is featured on the standard “Stablemates,” and Otto plays on his original tune “Euphony.” These are two of the longest tracks on the album, both roughly eight minutes in length, yet you’ll find yourself wishing they were longer.

“It’s hard to put into words what it’s like having Bobby and Matt on the album,” Martin says. “It really feels like a dream at times. They both have inspired me to continue to push for growth until the day I can’t play anymore, and I can’t thank them enough for that.”

Guide to Outdoor Living 2022

Elevate your outdoor living space with the tips and ideas in this special advertising section. These 2022 outdoor living trends will inspire you to prepare for the spring season.

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

31

GUIDE TO OUTD O OR LIVING

1

Backyard Birding

Birding is booming. According to Garden Media Group, sales of bird feeders and feed reached $2.2 billion in 2021, and Audubon’s Bird Guide app grew eighty-one percent from 2019 to 2020. In a matter of weeks, birds will make their way back up to our neck of the woods. To optimize bird activity in your yard, plant native flowers and shrubs that birds like, such as asters, sunflowers, coreopsis and cardinal flowers.

Set out a nice feeder for birds to perch on, preferably near a shrubby area and stocked with plenty of feed, install a birdbath, grab a pair of binoculars, and enjoy the show.

2

Adult Playgrounds

In 2020 and 2021, we saw remote employees taking their Zoom conference calls al fresco and getting creative with outdoor home office spaces (TL;DR: A WiFi range extender is key).

Work hard, play harder: Adult yard games and activities are trending now more than ever. And we don’t mean yard games that you pack up and store in your garage or shed at the end of the day.

Think permanent fixtures like a backyard axe throwing target. Or, if throwing sharp tools for fun isn’t your cup of tea, consider a putting green, custom horseshoe pit or hook and ring setup.

Spring to Life The seven biggest outdoor living trends we’ll see in 2022

BY NICOLE KINNING

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

3

Dahlias

Dahlias are becoming more popular by the day for both new and seasoned gardeners, and we can’t blame them. The perennials’ stunning plate-sized blooms grow up to ten inches in diameter and come in every color of the rainbow.

Mark Corder, secretary of the Great Kansas City Dahlia Society (kcdahlia.org), says that membership of the dahlia-lovers club is exponentially increasing: “When I joined six or eight years ago, there were probably fifteen or twenty active people,” he says. “I recently had to count the number of people that were still on the rolls, and it’s around a hundred. But probably twenty-five to thirty of those joined in the last few years.”

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The society’s acting officer, Ron Stauffer, says that he thinks dahlias are becoming increasingly popular in home gardens because the labor is worth the reward, as the Instagrammable flowers bloom continuously from late summer into fall. “When I have dahlias in the yard, I can go out there and I can cut three, four, five bouquets,” Stauffer says.

“And you can’t see that I’ve ever been out there because they are so prolific. The more you cut, the more you get.”

4

Curved Pools and Gardens

Curved furniture, like sculptural couches and asymmetrical rounded tables, will be huge in 2022, and it will be no different in outdoor living. According to Pinterest, search volume for “round pool deck ideas” was up a hundred and seventy percent by the end of 2021. If you’re not looking to build a home pool anytime soon, try the trend with spherical or curved garden beds, round daybeds, halfmoon benches, circular water features and fire pits.

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

5

Outdoor Showers

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is undoubtedly the biggest garden show in the world, and one trend that rubbed off on garden bloggers last year was hardscaping with a coastal theme, with a huge emphasis on outdoor showers.

Outdoor showers are not only ideal for washing off pool chemicals; they also add a spa- or resort-like experience to a home and can increase home value.

If installing an outdoor shower yearround in this pocket of the Midwest is not realistic to you but you still want that indoor-outdoor spa bathroom feel, try an indoor shower with a floor-to-ceiling frosted glass window, or install a balcony off the bathroom.

6

Electric-Only Lawn Equipment

Last fall, the governor of California passed a law banning the sale of new gas-powered equipment using

small off-road engines, which includes lawn equipment like leaf blowers and lawnmowers. The new law will be applied in 2024, but if this is like any other movement that is born in California, it will eventually move eastward. Elimination of gas-powered equipment will also significantly reduce noise pollution.

7

Cultivation Licenses

Sabine Green, manager at Farrand Farms, says that she’s seen an influx of licensed cannabis growers coming into the greenhouse in search of supplies for growing the green.

“We sell a lot of soil that is geared towards cannabis growing,” Green says.

“We carry Nectar for the Gods, and that’s been a super popular one.” And as for grow lights, Green jokes that growers “probably go to Amazon for something a little less expensive.”

Get more info on cultivation licenses at health.mo.gov.

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If plants could talk, they’d say they need new digs—and Dee Ferguson believes in turning just about anything into a planter. Among her most striking creations are mouth planters ($35). Made from porcelain ashtrays, they’ve been repurposed to hold succulents where you’d imagine a tongue would be. Ferguson also recently designed Chinese takeout box planters ($40) that are 3D printed and finished with chopsticks, which can be used for stem support. Both the mouth and takeout planters include potted plants. You can find Ferguson’s designs in her plants and pots pop-up shop rOOTS around Kansas City and on the third floor of Bella Patina every first weekend of the month. Ferguson’s unique planters often sell out quickly. — MARY HE N N

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

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S WAY T R EN D

A NEW WAY TO YOUTH Is there a new noninvasive, more costefficient alternative to Botox and filler making its way to the Midwest?

BY M A R Y H E N N

C

is an entrepreneur and Chicago native who splits her time between the Midwest and Cali, where she learns the latest treatments and techniques in beauty. Currently, she works as a permanent makeup artist at KC PMU Studio at The Bungalow, which she co-owns in the Crossroads. She’s been practicing a relatively new cosmetic treatment that may serve as an alternative to Botox and filler, and it’s gaining popularity in the Midwest for its anti-aging effects.

It’s called fibroblasting, and it’s used to reduce the appearance of aging on the skin. “Fibroblasting is newer to the states,” Haghmanesh says. “It’s been practiced in other countries as a means of treating burn victims. I use a small machine to go into the skin and make tiny little burn marks to singe the top of the skin.” After she singes tiny circles into targeted areas, they scab and heal to reveal softer, smoother and younger-looking skin.

38

AITLIN HAGHMANESH

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

When fibroblasting is done around the upper lip area, it lifts the lip upward, giving the appearance of a fuller lip without injections—the procedure has commonly been referred to as a “lip flip.” The cauterized skin pulls taut and appears firmer and lifted.

“It’s such a cool alternative to injections because it’s noninvasive,” Haghmanesh says. She also says that fibroblasting typically only has to be done once a year, whereas Botox and fillers are usually administered every few months.

In addition to fibroblasting, Haghmanesh is certified in scalp pigmentation, scar camouflage, microblading, powder brows and lip blushing—permanent makeup procedures that have been booming in the Midwest more recently, too. “Permanent makeup isn’t just tattooing; there’s a lot to it,” Haghmanesh says. “I’m trying to make people here less scared about the process.”

Lip blushing, one of the permanent makeup procedures, offers another alternative to lip fillers. The procedure involves needling pigment onto the lips to achieve the desired color. The deposit of ink also plumps the lips, giving them a fuller look without the risk of looking overdone.

Haghmanesh believes in creating artful cosmetic results that give a natural and realistic look. “I want to enhance a person’s natural beauty, not change it,” she says. So she customizes each procedure to a person’s face and bone structure.

“Everything on social media right now is filters and smoke screens,” Haghmanesh says. “I want to let people know that there are cosmetic options available that enhance your natural beauty. They’re not all bad—you don’t have to not look like yourself or look overdone.”

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S WAY I N T ERV I E W

ONE-STOP BEAUTY SHOP Local hairstylist Laurabeth Clark has risen to celebrity hair status in just a few years. Now, she has her own salon in the River Market.

grew up around her grandmother, a hairdresser who ran her own beauty salon out of her house while young Clark played in the salon. In 2013, inspired by her grandmother and hoping to follow in her footsteps, Clark went to beauty school.

Clark started her career as a hairstylist at Ulta after graduating from beauty school in 2014. She took all the clients she could outside of Ulta and snapped photos of her work to post on social media. After more exposure and a lot of hustle, Clark found space for her own salon in the River Market at the end of 2020.

Now, Clark runs her salon Artistry by LB while traveling back and forth from KC to LA to do hair for celebrities like Madison Beer and Iggy Azalea. Clark has also styled for the Grammys and wives of NFL players.

We caught up with Clark in her new salon, which is soon to partner with Indigo MedSpa and Recreating Rays for botox and sunless tanning services, making Artistry by LB a space for collaborative beauty and your onestop beauty shop. We talked to Clark about her success, the current hair trends and her favorite spots around the city.

L AU R A B E T H C L A R K

You just celebrated Artistry by LB’s one-year anniversary in February. What has it been like opening and running the salon? It’s been quite a year, and I’m very fortunate that my mother is a designer. She really helped build what I had envisioned. I gave her my Pinterest page, and she made it happen.

I wanted the space to be different from every traditional salon. I think every salon, every Instagram page is starting to look the same—I don’t mean that in a rude way. I always tell my stylists to be themselves, to post what they want and to dress how they want. I want them to feel comfortable and love who they are. We have vivid colors, we have extensions, we have a curl specialist. I think we have such a variety of women, and I love it. I want people to know they can come here for whatever they need.

Your rise to success happened pretty quickly, right? How did you achieve so much in just a few years? I tell my stylists that social media has been a huge vehicle for my success. Instagram and word of mouth quickly brought in more clients. Before I knew it, I was styling for just random photoshoots in the area. I also love to connect and build relationships with other local businesses. Those connections can bring clients, too.

What do you envision as the big hair trends for the rest of 2022? I personally think the ’90s and 2000s are back and here to stay.

You see all these bold colors, and everyone’s excited to try anything. The big blowouts are back, and the Dyson Airwrap has been huge. I love it—I’m very into big hair.

40

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

FAVO R I T E S P OT S Farina “Any time my husband and I are in Kansas City and we’re celebrating, we go to Farina. It’s delicious, and the service is unreal. ”

The Monarch Bar “I feel like everyone says Monarch, but they’re good. We do love Monarch. ”

Etiquette Boutique and Luxxe Apparel “The first is in Prairie Village and the other is in Lee’s Summit.

As far as shopping goes, those are two boutiques here that I love.”

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACQUELINE AYALA | PHOTO ASSISTANT JESSICA CASON

BY M A R Y H E N N

What was it like signing a lease for your own salon in 2020 in the midst of pandemic shutdowns? When I first walked in, it looked like a fraternity. It was completely abandoned.

People just left their food and coffee mugs.

Anyone would have walked in and thought it was disgusting, but I walked in and saw a hair salon. So I signed into a five-year lease, which was very scary, especially with Covid and so much being unknown—but you never know unless you try.

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KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

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S WAY HOM E

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KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

WOODSY WONDER Designer Julie Arnold creates a sustainable, modern home for her family in a wooded area just north of the river.

BY DAW N YA B A R T S C H

PHOTO BY JULIA ARNOLD

A

S A Y O U N G C O U P L E , Julie and Christian Arnold enjoyed loft living and being able to walk to shops. But as their family started to grow, they knew they needed a little more room and outdoor space for their kids to play and explore.

They were able to find the perfect mix in Old Briarcliff, just north of the river. They found a piece of property in a wooded area that backed up to the Kansas City Park Reserve and was within walking distance of shops at The Village at Briarcliff.

“It’s a very steep lot and probably a little daunting for most,” says Julie, an interior and product designer. “We were drawn to the natural setting that backs up to a park preserve that feels so secluded yet five minutes to downtown.”

Christian is an architect, and the property offered close proximity to downtown Kansas City and his firm, Clockwork Architecture, in the River Market. It also fit well with Julie’s business, Create Place, which offers “creative direction, design and styling” with a focus on telling her client’s story.

The two-story house sits partially on stilts and jets out into the trees, not unlike a treehouse.

“That’s our favorite part—seeing the trees changing out the windows or from the terrace and the natural light that comes through all the windows,” Julie says.

The main floor, which encompasses the kitchen, dining and living areas, is an open area that’s “flooded with natural light.” The home’s inspiration came from the couple’s “loft living in Boston and Kansas City,” says Julie, who grew up in a small town in Kansas but studied interior architecture, product and furniture design at Boston Architectural College.

“We wanted to incorporate open living spaces to engage in family activities,” Julie says. “We deliberately kept the children’s bedrooms smaller to focus more on larger family spaces.”

The home is just 2,500 square feet, and the Arnolds aimed to make it sustainable by using salvaged and repurposed materials and objects when possible.

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

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S WAY HOM E

1

1 THE OFFICE NOOK The Arnolds built an open nook—like a closet without a door—in the office that holds a desk and computer. This dedicated homework space can be concealed with a curtain when not in use.

2

2 THE OFFICE Just as it would be in a loft, office space was carved out of the main living area using a partition that doesn’t reach the ceiling. However, the Arnolds’ unique partition is like a freestanding sculpture and was created by weaving thinly cut walnut pieces into an open basket weave pattern. The rich wood pattern not only adds depth, texture and a bit of privacy but also lets in light.

With a couch and large wood desk, the office is a place to be away from the action of the main living area while still being close enough to feel a part of it all.

With its simple blue-on-blue stencil pattern, the wall behind the desk also becomes a piece of art.

44

KANSAS CITY MARCH 2022

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIA ARNOLD AND TARA SHUPE

2

3

3 THE DINING AREA

Julie designed the large dining table and commissioned a local craftsman to build it using salvaged wood, then finished it herself. She also made the two large light pendants that hang above the table by creating a wire form and draping them with the same fabric she used to conceal the office nook.

4

4 TH E KITC H EN Quartz countertops and cabinets with a simple walnut veneer create a streamlined, modern kitchen that’s open to the rest of the living area.

“I love to cook, so having a kitchen that opens up to the living and dining rooms makes me feel connected to all the other activities,” Julie says.

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

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5 THE M A IN LIVING ARE A Julie describes her style as a “refined, natural aesthetic, often mixing in sustainable and vintage furniture and finishes.”

She adds that her “guiding inspiration comes from the simplicity of Scandinavian design, mid-century classics, nature and travel.”

Those elements are apparent throughout her entire home. One of her home’s signature pieces is a mid-century credenza flanked by two Eames chairs.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIA ARNOLD AND SARAH SWEENEY

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6 MOTHER AND SON Julie and her fourteen-year-old son James recently won a design contest with Lucent Lightshop for a sconce design that Julie will soon be installing in her home’s master bedroom.

Her son had been learning modeling programs for some of his product design ideas, and she thought it would be the perfect opportunity for him to develop his skills further.

The children are learning the entire process of making the tray, from conception to finding the perfect piece of wood to creating the tray and selling it.

7 THE BELL Julie bought the hammered bell in a shop while traveling through Salt Lake City.

She hung the bell on a wall right next to a door leading to the outdoor terrace with the idea that she could ring it to let her children know it was time to come in. “I liked the idea of ringing the bell when my kids were out playing in the forest,” she says.

KANSASCITYMAG.COM MARCH 2022

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Slice of life

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W O R D S Martin Cizmar, Natalie Torres Gallagher, Mary Henn, Nicole Kinning, Patrick Moore, Patrick Mulvihill, Hampton Stevens I L LU S T R AT I O N S Makalah Hardy P H O T O G R A P H Y Zach Bauman

Get 'em while they're hot!

KC pizza is on the come up.

Our 43 favorite pies, pans and slices.

pie of the year Grandma Pizza at Clay & Fire N ATA L I E TO R R E S G A L L A G H E R

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They say even when pizza is bad, it’s good.

That makes determining great pizza difficult. How can something so simple and so satisfying spur coastal rivalries and inspire such divisive emotions? And how do you put everything aside—all the variations in technique and crust and style—and crown one pizza best of them all?

If you have had the Grandma pizza at Clay & Fire, this question answers itself. That’s why it’s our pie of the year.

Clay & Fire is not necessarily known for its pizza. The menu is near-Eastern, and there are only two pies on the menu. But chef Brent Gunnels came to the kitchen in a roundabout way. Mid-pandemic, Clay & Fire owner Adam Jones discovered Cult of Pi, Gunnels’ ongoing backyard pizza pop-up, and offered Gunnels a job. He brought his dough recipe with him: a straightforward combination of flour, salt, water and yeast, with a refrigerated fermentation (to control the rise) and a laborious kneading process (to control the crumb).

The Grandma pizza is a classic margherita, Gunnels’ favorite. Only he inverts the layers—cheese first, then dollops of chunky garlic tomato sauce.

“It’s called the Grandma pizza because that is what that style of pizza is called on Staten Island and South Brooklyn,” he says. “It’s Sicilian style, which a lot of people would consider deep-dish style, with sauce on top of the cheese. It’s my homage to New Yorkstyle pizza.”

What comes out of Clay & Fire’s wood-fired oven is a twelve-inch pie with a leopard-spotted crust. There is char. There is fresh basil, shredded and scattered evenly. There is a drizzle of olive oil to finish. And when you take a bite of this pizza, when you get the fresh tomato and the melty cheese and the fire-licked crust all in one mouthful, it is almost like you are tasting pizza—really tasting it—for the first time.

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Pies and slices for an Empire State of Mind

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PIZZA TASCIO 1111 Burlington St., North Kansas City The Northland's brand-new Pizza Tascio is an homage to old ideals, built from more advanced tools. The New York crust here is made with 00 flour (AP is traditional) in order to get it thin and just a little crispy with water from the Missouri instead of the Hudson. The details are on-point here, including the spicy pepperoni, which is finished with a light brushing of Mike's Hot Honey. For Tascio’s slices, those pies are essentially par-baked, then finished in the deck oven upon order. Hungry for two slices? You might as well buy a whole pie—you’re unlikely to have regrets.

Grimaldi’s 5601 W. 135th St., Overland Park The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883. Grimaldi’s Pizza opened under it, on the east bank of the East River, in 1990. It gives you some sense of how much cajones the Grimaldis have to stamp their boxes with “the Pizza that made the [century-old] Brooklyn Bridge famous.”

And yet no one argued with Patsy Grimaldi—or the folks that operate coal-fired franchises across fourteen states. Grimaldi made pizzas like he learned from his uncle at Patsy’s in east Harlem, one of the most famous pizzerias in the world. Patsy’s of Harlem may still be the gold standard, and I was duly impressed a few years ago, but I've never walked out of the Grimaldi’s at Prairie Fire unsatisfied. This is great New York pizza, with milky mozzarella and a kiss of coal-fired char.

Haha’s Pizza Hub

Fat Sully’s

3834 Main St., KCMO

4144 Pennsylvania Ave., KCMO

Haha’s Pizza on Main Street in Midtown KCMO feels a lot like New York. There’s a door open to the alley, the din of construction on the streets outside and a little lobby packed with people getting carryout pizzas. It’s a little thick for Brooklyn, a little thinner than most local pies and heavy on the cheese. Haha’s is open until 3 am on weekends and also makes everything from falafel to wings.

The oversized slices at Fat Sully’s in Westport come to KC via Denver and D.C. The “jumbo slice” is a staple of our nation’s capital, where it originated as a way of catching the attention of after-bar crowds in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. But the foundation of these massive—a foot from tip to crust and wider than a paper plate—slices is the classic foldable New York slice. You end up eating it like a stromboli, and loving every grease-slicked bite.

PIZZA THE GUY ON THE BOX How the owner of a KC pizza shop bootstrapped himself into becoming a frozen pizza baron HIS NAME IS JASON RANSOM,

Buffalo State 1815 Wyandotte St., KCMO and 7901 Santa Fe Drive, Overland Park Buffalo State has two local locations, both previously named Papa Keno’s—that switcheroo inspired a lawsuit that’s fallen off the radar. Buffalo State resembles its Papa with classic New York-style pies that get oven-heated until the mozzarella gets a little brown and bubbly and the pepperoni cups up.

and his official title is company president, but you can call him “the guy on the box.”

“On my business card, under my name, it says ‘The guy on the box,’” he says. “When I used to go give out samples in grocery stores, my picture was on the box and people would say, ‘Wait, are you the guy on the box?’ Some people would come back with a Sharpie and be like, ‘Can you sign my box?’”

That was a long time ago, when Ransom was still growing his The Dish frozen pizza empire, which grew out of his restaurant of the same name in Liberty, off Highway 291. For seventeen years, Ransom and his wife ran that restaurant, which specialized in the Chicago-style deep dish pies that are now his top seller.

“I decided, why not package this and take it to the local Hy-Vee and see if they’ll give us some shelf space?” he says.

Hy-Vee in Liberty was The Dish’s only account for two years.

“Some other Hy-Vees started calling—’Why don’t you bring it to Parkville, why don’t you bring it to Gladstone?’” he says.

So he did—in a Ford Windstar.

“I’d pull up to the back of these stores, I’d stick the boxes in a cart, and I’d roll up and deliver them to the cases and print up an invoice,” he says.

The legality of selling frozen foods that have not been USDA-inspected and were transported in a minivan without refrigeration is, let’s say, open to debate.

As The Dish grew, Ransom decided to go fully legit. He turned his banquet room into a USDA-approved production facility and bought a freezer truck.

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The Dish’s pies are now made at an eight thousand-square-foot production facility in North Kansas City and available from Cheyenne to Albuquerque, in ten states across the west.

The frozen pizza market is highly competitive and dominated by major players. “It’s just an illusion of choice because there are basically three of four companies that have all those brands,” he says. “Nestle has five brands. You’re buying a pizza you think is unique and it’s just Nestle.”

Which brings up one of the other things you may notice about The Dish’s pies. It’s not your imagination; they are always “on sale.”

“I’m swimming in an ocean of sharks,” Ransom says. “They’re never not on sale, so I’ve got to compete with their tactics. We have been trained as customers to be responsive to sales tags.”

The Dish’s big breakthrough in sales came from advice passed on by a local chef, who mentioned that the original forty-minute bake time on the frozen pies was too long for most consumers who “don’t have any patience.” Instead, Ransom’s recipe now advises you to microwave the pie for a few minutes while the oven heats up.

“You microwave from frozen and then bake it off and it’s fifteen minutes,” he says. “That was huge.

We sell a lot more now.”

TRUST THE PROCESSED Where to get St. Louis-style pizza in Kansas City W O R D S PAT R I C K M U LV I H I L L | P H OTO G R A P H Y A N N A P E T R O W

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S A ST. LOUIS NATIVE living in

KC, I’ve heard just about every jab—we St. Louisans care too much about where we went to high school, we think too highly of our baseball fandom and, yes, we no longer have an NFL team. Fair enough. But I refuse to stand idly by while people badmouth St. Louis-style pizza.

Is it an acquired taste? Perhaps. Is it bad?

Definitely not.

For those who are unfamiliar, St. Louis-style pizza has three unique characteristics: a waferthin crust, a distinctive processed cheese and an unconventional slicing method. The pizza dough is made without yeast, resulting in a thin and crispy crust. The pie is cut into squares, not slices. The pies are topped with a processed cheese called Provel, a waxy "blend” of cheddar, Swiss and provolone. It’s a local product and prized for its low melting point, which makes it buttery and gooey out of the oven. As the pizza cools, Provel hardens into a gluey, plastic-like consistency—the leftover slices are extra good as part of a nutritious breakfast.

Kansas City has four spots making authentic St. Louis pies, and all have their merits.

You cannot mention St. Louis-style pizza without first paying homage to the chain that started it all: Imo’s Pizza. There are now two local Imo’s franchises, both on the Kansas side: 4200 Rainbow Blvd., KCK and 11552 W. 135th St., Overland Park. Imo’s also has toasted ravioli and uses Provel in its unmelted form on its salads.

The other well-known St. Louis-style pies in KC can be found at Waldo Pizza (7433 Broadway St. KCMO), which was founded by a St. Louis native in 1987. Waldo actually serves three distinctive

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styles of pie, so be sure to ask for St. Louis-style if you’re watching a Blues game. Those pies are something of a hybrid, using a Provel-heavy blend that dilutes the gooeyness with standard mozzarella. Waldo also applies a thin coat of garlic butter to its St. Louis-style pies before they’re sauced. Note: After discontinuing its lunch buffet during the pandemic, Waldo has now brought it back on Fridays and Saturdays.

Everyone knows that pizza pairs best with an ice-cold beer. For the full experience, look no further than Columbus Park, the historic heart of Kansas City’s Italian community. Moretina's Caddy Shack (700 E. Third St., KCMO) is a dimly lit sports bar with TVs hung on every available wall. It serves “Sicilian-style thin crust” pub pies, defaulting to mozzarella. But there’s Provel in stock, and the staff is happy to blend the cheeses directly onto the square-cut slices.

Up in Gladstone, Leo’s Pizza (408 N.W. Englewood Road, KCMO) has been family-owned for four decades. The original owner passed away more than a decade ago, but things are mostly unchanged in this old-school spot with drop ceilings and brown carpet. Shrimp is among the available toppings, and mozzarella is available upon request, but Provel is the house cheese.

Be warned that the regulars are fiercely loyal, and weekend waits can stretch to an hour and forty-five minutes. Ordering ahead on Fridays and Saturdays is highly recommended.

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THE HAWKEYE CROWS Iowa-style breakfast pizza Some of my most memorable college days in Iowa City started with a piece of pizza for breakfast before tailgating on a Saturday morning. And it wasn’t cold, leftover pizza ordered the night before. The pizza I speak of is formulated for breakfast and doesn’t come from a pizza joint you’ll find anywhere on this list of the best pizza spots in Kansas City. It came from a gas station.

In the Hawkeye State, the breakfast pizza from Casey’s is legendary—so much so that Cedar Rapids native Ashton Kutcher and wife Mila Kunis have declared their love for it publicly. The pizza, offered by the slice in a rotating heated glass case or as a whole pie if you order ahead, is topped with scrambled eggs, mozzarella cheese and bacon bits or sausage crumbles.

No place loves breakfast pizza like Iowa—there’s a spot in Des Moines that tops pies with Froot Loops—but Casey’s is king.

Around KC, the gas stations are harder to find (7875 Quivira Road, Lenexa, is the only one inside the 435 loop), so my guess is that most drive around the corner to QuikTrip for their fix of breakfast ’za. But I’ve found a few highlights beyond institutions that also sell gas and lottery tickets: You Say Tomato (2801 Holmes St., KCMO) has a heavenly breakfast flatbread topped with usual suspects eggs and bacon alongside roasted potatoes and a smattering of gravy. Then there’s Clock Tower Bakery (7911 Santa Fe Drive, Overland Park) in downtown OP, where the pizza’s eggs are baked in a sheet over the pizza crust instead of scrambled up. Here, you get a few choices of toppings, and I found that adding tomatoes was the perfect acidic cut to the eggs and Swiss cheese. Caffetteria (25 On The Mall, Prairie Village) also has a solid breakfast pie.

Their version of breakfast pizza is oven-fired and equipped with bacon and mozzarella, fontina and parmesan. But two cracked eggs on top are what make it the most important meal of the day. —Nicole Kinning

ITALIAN-ISH These pies are more Naples than NoHo—many are a knife and fork affair.

Martin City Pizza & Taproom If you happen to be out south in the suburb of Martin City, which has grown exponentially in the last decade, you’ll probably find yourself pulled into one of its best draws: Martin City Pizza & Taproom. At this pizza-centric taproom, which also has locations in Lee’s Summit and Mission Farms, you’ll often find live music being played to a packed bar singing along to cover bands. The pies are as much of a draw as the potent IPAs: Order the Chicken Spanakopita pie with garlic Alfredo sauce topped with chicken, artichoke hearts, spinach, feta, EVOO and parmesan. —Katie Henrichs

Norcini Norcini opened at the end of 2019 in Strang Hall by the self-taught chef Chad Tillman, a master butcher with over twenty years of experience. The quick and casual spot offers sandwiches and “artisanal” pizzas inspired by the Neapolitan tradition—the dough is cold-fermented for seventy-two hours before being hand-tossed and wood-fired, but it takes on unconventional toppings. While the pizzas will often feature seasonally cured meats, Norcini’s creations have also included a Slap’s BBQ pie and a mac and cheese-topped pizza, but the crab rangoon pizza is always on the menu. It’s topped with cream cheese crab filling, mozzarella, crunchy wonton scraps and a bit of green onion, plus two Calabrian chilis crossed at the center, beneath which another layer of flavor, the sweet chili sauce, oozes out. —Mary Henn

Spin Pizza Back in 2005, when local chain Spin opened, Neapolitan pizza was still something of an oddity on these shores. A lot has changed in almost twenty years, and Spin has adapted not by clinging to its bonafides, which are respectable, but by emphasizing its fast casual side—banishing obscure Italian words from their menu and adding items like a Cobb salad. There are, at present, fifteen Spins, including locations in Texas and Nebraska, but most are in the KC area. Spin’s pizzas come out fresh and fast and are heavy on toppings compared to traditional Italian pies, making them perhaps better-suited to meat-loving Midwestern audiences. —Martin Cizmar

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Il Lazzarone Il Lazzarone is one of fewer than a hundred spots in the entire country to earn certification as authentic Neapolitan pizza from the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. The original project from noted local pizzaiola Erik Borger opened in the River Market in 2015, firing pies in imported Acunto Mario ovens. Ingredients are often imported here, and red pies are made with San Marzano tomatoes while white pizzas are made with perfected ratios of mozzarella and olive oil. Each maintains the customary leopard-spot char around the edge. The simple ricotta pizza is one of our favorites, topped with fresh garlic, basil, oregano and mozzarella, then finished with tiny pools of whipped ricotta.

Not everything is traditional at Il Laz, though—the Nutella pie is topped with bananas and sugared strawberries. —Mary Henn

1889 PIZZA NAPOLETANA Another local Neapolitan pizza joint, 1889 is cozied in a strip mall in KCK. 1889 was started by Kelli and Jason Kolich, who met while studying abroad in Italy and bonded over their shared love for Italian culture and food. The wife-husband duo opened 1889 in 2014 and trained under world-renowned pizzaiolo Tony Gemignani. The crust here is a tad softer and a little less chewy than the crust at Il Laz, and the menu is a bit more adventurous—see the Prized Pig pizza with smoked pulled pork and barbecue sauce, for example. Of course, the menu also has signature Neapolitan pizzas like the margherita and quattro formaggi. But we think the Honey Bee is the way to go. It’s made with fresh pear slices and gorgonzola, then drizzled with local honey and topped with arugula. —Mary Henn

Bella Napoli After twenty years in Brookside, Jake Imperiale’s pizzeria and deli is an institution. The Neapolitan pies tend toward the soft and puffy, though you’ll occasionally get some leopard spotting. On Monday night, pies like the Fumoso Bianco with smoked mozzarella, speck, caramelized onions and arugula are just $7—arrive early or you may have to wait for a table. —Martin Cizmar

three pies for tHE third city

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PIZZA A Chicago native picks her three favorite Windy Citystyle pies in KC. NICOLE KINNING

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Traditional Chicago-style deep dish pizza is its own type of food science. A flaky, buttery, biscuit-like crust lines the bottom of the pan.

Cheese hides the toppings, and red sauce hides the cheese—the cheese is buried below the sauce so that it doesn’t get scorched by the long bake required to cook a cake-thick crust. As a Chicagoland native, I can say with authority that Third Coast in Lenexa (7820 Quivira Road, Lenexa) makes a very solid deep dish pizza. The makeup of the pies is comparable to Chicago tourist trap Lou Malnati’s, but the slices hold themselves up way better, in my opinion, not falling to the sag and spoon-able soupiness that often comes with the deep dish territory. The deeper the pie, the more simple I keep the toppings, so I just stick with pepperoni here and let the crust do the talking.

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Why choose between an Italian beef sandwich and pizza when you can have both? Pizza Man (10212 Pflumm Road, Lenexa) is everything a Windy City expat could want, right down to the Vienna Beef signs and 2016 World Series posters lining the restaurant, which is covertly sandwiched between two daycare entrances in a Lenexa strip mall. The Italian beef thin crust pizza here is a special kind of magic— tender beef slices and pops of giardiniera are mounded into clumps under a thick sheet of mozzarella. And the cashier won’t let you walk away without what is perhaps the most important part of any Italian beef fare: a bowl of warm, greasy, au jus to dip the crispy crust into.

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I grew up on Rosati’s Pizza (9928 College Blvd., Overland Park), so this Chicago-born chain now sprinkled across the continental map is a no-brainer for me.

It’s still the best Chicago-style thin-crust pizza I’ve found in these parts. No matter the toppings, you can rest assured that there will be a smattering of giardiniera, a quintessential condiment that I have a hard time eating pizza without. And if your family is anything like mine, you’ll end up fighting over the tiny, crispy triangle scraps that rim the party-cut pie.

TIME SHUTTLE A former Jayhawk revisits Pizza Shuttle.

Pizza Shuttle is an institution. For Jayhawks of a certain age, the restaurant (invariably pronounced with an “i” in place of the “u”) was an oasis—virtually the only place in Lawrence to get hot food delivered after the bars closed.

Ordering it, though, wasn’t just a way to placate stomachs filled with cheap beer. It was an act of maturity, a declaration of independence. For the first time in your life, you were in the adult world, making adult decisions, and you’d decided to make some bad ones.

Eating junk, after all, is more than a mere culinary indulgence. It’s an embrace of life, an expression of the glorious, bulletproof feeling that’s so emblematic of youth. Junk food is an act of true mindfulness, a hot and greasy way to seize the moment, heedless of one’s waistline or cholesterol. It’s like smoking— fun, maybe, but very, very dumb.

Last month, I tried Shuttle again. It was honestly a bit like going back to college at forty. The pie was the same, predictably bland and greasy. But the circumstances around it were so different that the experience became unrecognizable. Instead of a raucous apartment on Ohio Street, I was alone in my Johnson County home. Instead of an inner voice whispering “indulge,” I heard my cardiologist whispering “Is that really such a good idea?”

The thrill was gone. Shuttle pie is a hot, fast, salty, fatty, guilty pleasure. The best way to enjoy it is probably drunk, late at night, while making bad decisions.

Just like youth itself. —Hampton Stevens

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SARAH’S ON THE HILL Regardless of where you reside, Sarah’s on the Hill will make you a little jealous. The Hill in question is Strawberry, and this laid-back KCK pizzeria pub stands out as probably the best little neighborhood joint in the city. It’s a homey corner space with tatty hardwood floors and exposed brick, somehow even more inviting because the dining chairs are nineties vintage, reclaimed from a high school. Both the namesake and founder, Sarah, and the current owner, her brother John, are Breitensteins, part of a large family of old stock Hill people—the family owns Breit’s Stein and Deli, which is famous for its Reuben. Here, the big draw is the pizza, which is great always but a steal at happy hour. The pies are medium-thick and plenty cheesy while delivering some sourness and char in the crust.

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Is there such a thing as “Kansas City-style” pizza?

That question is best left to philosophers and madmen. But there are pies that strike us as best in the spirit of the city.

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Easy Inn In the aftermath of a January snowstorm, long after the plows had cleared the roads, I ordered a pizza online from Sarah’s on the Hill. When I arrived at the quiet KCK corner to pick up my dinner, I encountered a lone figure hunched over the deadbolt at the door to Sarah’s, fumbling with his keys. His name was Charlie, and around the broken cigarette dangling from his lips, he told me that the restaurant had closed due to the snow. I decided to make my way to the Easy Inn just a few blocks away, where the bartender recommended the jalapeno popper pizza. Shorty’s Pizza—that’s what Easy Inn’s co-owners John Stoner and Blake Lostal have branded their cracker-thin crust pies—is simple and satisfying in a pinch, best paired with a Lone Star or five.

Conroy’s The bartender at Conroy’s gave me a wry smile when I asked about the Reuben pizza. “It started as a St. Patrick’s Day special, and it was well-received by drunk people,” he said with a laugh. “You’re gonna love it or you’re gonna hate it. Some people will drive for miles to get it, but no one tries it and says, ‘Oh, it’s all right.’” And I’ll admit, there’s something about the idea of Thousand Island dressing being cooked and combined with warm sauerkraut that didn’t quite sit with me—until I tried a slice of the famed Conroy’s pie. It combines everything that works about a perfectly balanced sandwich—sweet and tangy dressing, the sour crunch of pickled cabbage, salty corned beef—and marries it with melted Swiss and mozzarella on a perfectly puffy crust.

Artego Unpopular opinion: Hawaiian pizza is king of pizza. It hits the sweet-saltyfatty trifecta, and when you get it at Artego (opened in 2014 by former Chiefs player Joe Perez), you get a smooth cream cheese bonus. Do yourself a favor and add jalapenos for a little heat. Crust here is crispy and buttery on the outside and deliciously bready inside.

DETROIT WHAT, DETROIT WHAT

Sarpino’s

The Combine

If you are looking for the least of all evils when it comes to late-night delivery, Sarpino’s is your answer. It’s saucy. It’s cheesy. It’s garlicky.

You can usually get a meal deal online. And no one from this Canadian chain with outposts across the Midwest will shame you if you order the double-cheese garlic breadsticks with extra sides of marinara.

The Combine opened in 2020 in a former Wonder Bread factory on 30th and Troost. Co-owner Alan Kneeland teamed up with Jason Pryor, the owner of Pizza 51, to bring football-sized slices to the neighborhood, and the recipe holds up. For under five bucks, you can get a twelve-inch slice—cut into manageable, bite-sized squares—featuring a thin crust with just the right touch of grease, char and cornmeal dust.

Cupini’s People always seem to forget about the pizza at Cupini’s. They get distracted by the fresh tortellini and uniform slices of cheesecake and tiramisu displayed in the deli case. But I’ll tell you what: The ten pies on offer at this casual neighborhood eatery are just as worthy of the spotlight. The six-inch small pizza makes an ideal appetizer, but save yourself the tableside squabbles and go for the twelve- or eighteen-inch. Cupini’s uses a light hand to sauce, which is all the better to enjoy the crispy, chewy crust reminiscent of a Neapolitan pizza. While their traditional pies are excellent, it’s the bianca style that gets us going. Try the Dino, with tangy gorgonzola cheese and slices of portabella mushrooms.

Minsky’s The house toppings at Minsky's sound like the kind of thing you come up with when you’re stoned. How else do you arrive at pies with options like chicken cordon bleu, tostada, Philly cheesesteak and spicy Thai? But the secret to the Kansas City-based chain’s success—with its forty-six years and eighteen locations—is that those pie-in-the-sky flavor mashups stand up in the cold light of day. The cheeseburger pizza— loaded with ground beef, cheddar, pickles, mustard and a red sauce that mimics ketchup’s sweetness—is a customer favorite. But the gold goes to the mac and cheese pie: Macaroni noodles and thick-cut bacon are folded with white cheddar and mozzarella into alfredo sauce.

Respectfully, there’s only one Detroit-style pie you need to know in KC. The owners of Providence Pizza come from Rhode Island, a state that has its own local style of red-top squarepan pizza. It makes sense, then, that they gravitated to the Motor City’s style of pie—red on top, fat but airy in the middle, with the cheese crisped against the edge of the pan. A few years ago, there were a handful of decent Detroit pies in the city. Today, the two local locations of Providence (one in the Parlor food hall downtown, the other in Grandview) have proofed up to the top of any discussion about the style. A recent visit showed why: The sauce is so thick and acidic it stops just shy of puckering atop the salty mozzarella, and the crust that gets fried in its own oils in the pan but remains doughnut-fluffy. It is the Diana Ross of local Detroit-style pizzas, and all others can only aspire to be Mary Wilsons.

—Martin Cizmar

Pizza By the N Gram The Devoured pop-up serves some of the best pizza you'll ever eat, made with a backyard oven won on Instagram.

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OT ALL INSTAGRAM CONTESTS ARE GRIFTS. Just ask Jhy Coulter.

The pizzaiola behind the Devoured pop-up —that's her pie on the cover of this month's mag—was scrolling Instagram during her years in the kitchen at Webster House when she came across a giveaway for a RoccBox backyard pizza oven run

by Instagram-famous Toronto chef Matty Matheson.

The post asked followers to like, comment and then share their ideas for adventures they’d have with the RoccBox if they won it.

“I just started going HAM,” Coulter says. “It was stupid, but I really wanted to win. Honestly, I thought those giveaways were a scam. I was like, ‘This shit isn’t real, but I’m going to try anyway.’”

It was real, and she won. That was back in August 2019. Obviously, a lot has changed since. When the pandemic started, Coulter was furloughed from her job as a chef in the executive kitchen for UMB Bank.

“I was like, ‘What do I do during this time?’” she says.

“I was unemployed and I was like, ‘Well I might as well pull out the RoccBox.' Before that, it was just for fun, like for Chiefs games and stuff. But I realized I really

PIZZA

LUCKY STAR Lucky Boys’ Tuesday pies were born of a tragedy that still stings the KC food community.

like using it. I started watching a bunch of pizza videos on YouTube and trying to perfect the dough. I became obsessed with the process.”

Coulter invited family and friends over to her Hyde Park home for socially distanced pickup pies. They were a hit—and she just kept getting better from there.

For an enthusiastic but average backyard pizza-maker and frequent pizza pop-up attendee (read: me), watching Coulter work a RoccBox is humbling. She shows a steady, practiced hand in every part of the process. She tosses the dough with an effortless flick of the wrist and can eyeball the pie’s progress in the oven while switching the song on her bluetooth radio, prepping the next pie and conducting an interview.

She’s adapted to using the backyard amatuer ovens by making her pies with squared sides so she doesn’t waste an inch of the one-foot stone. Her crust has a perfect puff—Coulter calls it a “cloud crust”— and just a kiss of char. She won’t disclose the types of flours she’s using or even the number of different flours she blends in. But even if you had her crust, her toppings are a level up. I was blown away by a pie with jalapeno bacon jam, black garlic ricotta, pecorino and parmesan. Playing with those flavor combinations is a big part of the fun, she says.

“If you obsess enough about it, then you can make the pie you want,” she says. “It takes a long time. There are still moments where I’m like, ‘This isn’t perfect.’ I’m always making improvements. I’m always making tweaks.”

Nick Vella was a rising star of Kansas City’s pizza community: His pandemic-born Observation Pizza, with its impeccable crust and irreverent toppings, was in demand even after his untimely death in August 2020, when his team briefly tried to carry the business forward in his honor.

Vella had been a regular at Lucky Boys in the West Bottoms, where he became friends with owner Justin Norcross. Norcross had introduced pizza to the bar menu during the pandemic as a travel-friendly takeout option.

“We just started nerding out together,” Norcross says. “We would drink and talk pizza, and techniques were shared, and around May of 2020, he gave me some of his starter to work with.”

Late last summer, as demand for Lucky Boys’ ’za hit a volume exceeding what Norcross could mix by hand, he tapped Farm to Market Bread Co. to begin producing the dough for him. As restaurants resumed indoor dining, Lucky Boys introduced a bi-weekly pizza night: Tuesdays and Thursdays, they swap out their standard bar menu for a build-your-own pizza menu. Norcross retrofitted the Lucky Boys convection oven with removable baking stones, turning out impeccable pizzas in five to seven minutes. The crust has just the right balance of sour, chew and crisp, riding the line between classic Neapolitan and bar pizza.

“Because of Nick’s starter, we get really good bubbles,” Norcross says. “It’s a lively dough—not like eating wet bread.”

—Natalie Torres Gallagher

THE CUT UP Kansas City slices ranked by how much they got

BY MARTIN CIZMAR AND PAT R I C K MOORE

Guy’s Deli Patrick here: I was honestly never a huge fan of the old Joe’s, though it did save my life on numerous occasions after 25-cent beer night at Harpo’s.

When Guy’s took over the window at Kelly’s Westport Inn, the new owners said they were keeping the old Joe’s Pizza Buy The Slice recipe. On our visit, the manager confessed they “upgraded everything.” The new recipe is a huge improvement.

Pizza Tascio It’s the real deal. See page 52.

PAG E 6 4

Leone’s Original

d’Bronx

The proprietor of this New York-style pizza joint in Overland Park started his career washing dishes in NYC. That vibe prevails at this slicery, where there are always plenty of pies ready to be finished in the oven and served up with a salad and a bottomless soda.

D’Bronx has been around long enough that there’s a nostalgia factor these days. Sadly, the quality has gone down over the years, but it’s still above average.

Grinders This is a bar, and it has bar pizza. You could do worse!

Pizza 51 Slow on delivery, light on flavor, heavy on grease. The crust varies between soggy and burned, and if you’re lucky, it might be both.

Providence Pizza Johnny Jo’s Fast, cheap, appropriately greasy slices on a paper plate. This West Plaza staple has authentic pizza shop vibes—you can tell the guys guys working own frisbee-catching dogs and here have stories about deliveries gone wild.

Providence has three locations, and all do slices —including hard-to-find Sicilian-style pizza by the slice. The New York thin-crust pepperoni uses pepps that cup up to make those delightful chalices of grease. The Famous Rick Lang is Sicilian style with thick-cut pepperoni, red sauce, mozzarella, Mike’s Hot Honey and a crunchy, umami-dense sesame seed crust.

Fat Sully’s Milwaukee Delicatessen Great cheese flavor, but they cut the tip off the slice and threw it in the box next to the slice, like some sort of Sicilian threat.

This new Westport spot with jumbo-sized slices is a good value after you’ve been playing pool and chugging tallboys at Gambal’s for hours.

But as someone who no longer drinks, I thought this slice was super average. Some parts of it were burnt, but I think that might be inevitable with a slice so comically large.

FRANK MCGONIGLE (1955-1982)

PAGE 66 . KANSAS CITY MAGAZINE

Published with permission of Steerforth Press

Ripple A N E X C E R P T F R O M KANSAS CITY AUTHOR JIM COSGROVE'S NEW B O O K

The disappearance of Frank McGonigle, free-spirited son of a prominent Brookside family, haunted south Kansas City for nine years. When a small town police department in a gritty Carolina town finally identified McGonigle as a body they knew as ‘the boy in the woods,’ it only deepened the mystery. Local author Jim Cosgrove’s new true crime memoir, Ripple, is a deeply personal investigation of the case.

STORY BY JIM COSGROVE

IF YOU MOVED AT A STEADY CLIP, cut through a

few yards, and hopped a couple of fences, you could get from our house to the McGonigles’ in about twelve minutes. They lived half a mile from where I grew up in the Brookside neighborhood of Kansas City, and their family looked a lot like ours — big, Irish, and Catholic — as was nearly every other family in our freckle-faced, Friday-fish-eating community.

And if you weren’t Irish, well, tough luck. In the blocks surrounding our house lived the Kennedys, McQueenys, McShanes, O’Mearas, O’Sullivans, O’Tooles, Donnellys, Hogans, Hadens, Monaghans, Murphys, and a dozen others, along with a handful of German Irish and French Irish families. On our street alone lived twenty-two kids under the age of seventeen. If a family had fewer than four children, you figured something must have gone wrong. Except for the few “publics,” we all went to St. Peter’s for church and school. And we walked there and back in gaggles, clogging up the sidewalks. As a kid, I assumed that if you weren’t Catholic, you were Jewish.

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In our part of town, you were one or the other. I discovered later that most of the white Protestants had fled across the state line into the Kansas suburbs to escape the unrest and tension following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the failure of voters in 1969 to approve a tax increase for the cash-strapped Kansas City School District. Most of the white Catholics and Jews remained because they had their own schools. I didn’t know the few Protestants who stayed, because they didn’t have kids. It turns out they were the older couples who yelled at us to get off their lawns.

None of us kids thought it odd that most of the Catholic families were also members of the Jewish Community Center. It’s just where we hung out. We were welcomed and comfortable there, and we shared some common bonds with the Jewish kids — an oppressive litany of archaic religious rules, heaps of guilt, and overbearing mothers.

Besides, the JCC had a massive outdoor swimming pool and the best baseball league in town with the coolest wool uniforms with stirrup socks.

My parents and the McGonigles’ parents were part of the first wave of post–Second Vatican Council “social justice” Catholics. They rallied for

peace, protested nuclear weapons proliferation, and worked for racial equality in our city. My father was one of the dozen white lawyers who succeeded in demanding that the local Kansas City Bar Association open membership to African American attorneys. Our parents became active in organizations like Kansas City Crisis, founded in the late 1960s by Black and white families dedicated to maintaining positive dialogue. I remember meetings in our house where the kids played upstairs, and the adults met downstairs to address envelopes and engage in spirited discussions. We met in the homes of black families, too — on the “other side” of Troost Avenue,

just a mile and a half to the east and the unofficial (yet understood) dividing line between black and white Kansas City.

Despite their well-meaning efforts, little progress was made toward integrating our city, and we, the Brookside children, remained blissfully oblivious in our lilywhite bubble.

Everyone in our part of Kansas City knew the McGonigles. Aside from their abundant contribution to the human population, the family had a regular place at dinner tables throughout the neighborhood. Sunday’s pot roast, Thanksgiving’s turkey, and Easter’s ham likely came from the meat cases at McGonigle’s Market. Their name was synonymous with quality meat. Even their family station wagon was endearingly dubbed the Meat Wagon. The nine McGonigle children were all older and far cooler than me. They were loud and fun and smart and tough with rapid-fire wits.

Many of them were in the same grades as some of my siblings at St. Peter’s Elementary School. Mena McGonigle

“The family had a regular place at dinner tables throughout the neighborhood.”

graduated with my sister Mary. Frank was the same age as my brother John.

Mark was in Ann’s class. Their youngest, Mike, was two years ahead of me in my sister Sheila’s class. I always envied my siblings who had an in with the McGonigle family. Especially my brother Tom. He and Jerry McGonigle were good friends throughout elementary and high school — still are. Jerry passed through our front door and squeezed in at our dinner table dozens of times, and Tom fit right into the McGonigles’ pool of testosterone like an honorary brother.

Their home, a two-story stucco house with a broad, L-shaped front porch, stood on a generous, shaded corner lot that was a hub of action in our bustling, kid-infested neighborhood. They were always fielding a game I was too young to play and throwing parties I was too young to attend. And their doors were always open — literally and figuratively.

The McGonigles loved to celebrate, with milestones like baptisms, first communions, and confirmations honored with white dresses, clip-on ties, and huge family receptions. They hosted a notoriously rowdy bingo game every New Year’s Eve, and in later years they were known to enthusiastically “hoist a few” in honor of their heritage every seventeenth of March, or on any other day of the year.

Devotion to religion was important.

Lots of prayers, rosaries, and masses.

And while the kids were still young, all eleven of the McGonigles would cram into a pew at the 8:30 a.m. mass every Sunday at St. Peter’s Church about five blocks down Meyer Boulevard from their home.

Frank McGonigle was the sixth of nine children, and, from the beginning, he did things differently. He was the only sibling born backward, and he didn’t talk much until he was about three. His sister Joanie said he didn’t seem to mind being alone. “He was the only kid I can remember sitting in a playpen and being happy about it.”

Joanie and her three sisters helped raise “the boys,” as the four youngest were called. Frank came along two years before Jerry, who was one of the most personable kids Joanie could ever remember. Jerry was always smiling, always laughing, always hugging. Frank

was sweet in his own way, but never pushed himself on anyone.

“I think about the times when those two little kids were sitting there,” remembered Joanie with a twinge of regret. “I’d always pick up Jerry because he would smile back at me.” As he got a little older, Frank would entertain himself for hours by dragging an old cardboard box out onto the concrete slab patio in the backyard and sitting in it, looking up at the hazy blue midwestern sky, watching the clouds that slipped by and the treetops that swayed in the wind. Frank had a few friends in elementary school, but his closest friends, it seems, were his brothers. Competition was constant in their big house on Walnut Street. The four younger McGonigle boys played with a foosball table in the basement — one of those games with the little plastic men on steel rods running through their torsos. They set up leagues and drew up match and playoff schedules. They even named their players and kept statistics on how they performed. Looking back, Jerry, Mark, and Mike all agree that those years seem to be when Frank was happiest.

As the boys grew more coordinated, broom hockey replaced foosball as the sport of choice. The concrete patio in the backyard became the battle rink for these one-on-one showdowns. Players would face off with their brooms, as a designated referee dropped the lid of a mayonnaise jar they used as a puck.

Tempers were tested as arms flew and shoulders checked each other. Half-serious fights would erupt to be broken up by the ref.

By the late 1960s, the McGonigle boys, like many kids in Kansas City, were football fanatics, driven by the perennially strong Kansas City Chiefs led by future Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson.

Frank and his brothers hosted neighborhood football games on the generous strip of grass between the sidewalk and the four-lane boulevard on the south side of the McGonigle house. Frank instituted himself as the all-time punter and kicker and insisted that everyone call him “Jan Frank-erud” after the Chiefs star placekicker Jan Stenerud. On most summer evenings, the streets and yards of Brookside teemed with impromptu games of Ghost in the Graveyard, Kick

“He was the only kid I can remember sitting in a playpen and being happy about it.” the Can, or Flashlight Tag. Inevitably some kid would run home crying because of an unfair ruling or a skinned knee or, like me, with a broken arm after a particularly rowdy round of Red Rover.

What I loved most about those games was that all ages were included. As one of the younger kids, I often teamed up with an older sibling or neighbor who would show me shortcuts and help me over fences. And when the streetlights came on, the excitement intensified — only to be squelched a short time later by the final “Olly, olly oxen free!” that signaled bedtime. Life was comfortable in Brookside. Each generously apportioned house possessed unique characteristics — modest wood-sided Craftsman bungalows with inviting front porches, half-timbered Tudor Revivals with steep gabled roofs, brick American Georgians with towering chimneys — all solidly built between 1920 and 1935.

Soaring oak, elm, and ash trees provided a thick canopy of shade in the summers.

It was the kind of neighborhood where somebody’s mom was always home, so if you were playing with kids on another block around lunchtime, you’d eat at their house. And all the moms served

PAGE 69 . KANSAS CITY MAGAZINE

PAGE 70 . KANSAS CITY MAGAZINE

BY MARTIN CIZMAR

RIPPLE: A LONG STRANGE SEARCH FOR A KILLER

organizing prayer chains and phoning relatives in other cities to look out for Frank. They scoured newspapers from around the country for clues.

They began attending Grateful Dead concerts to look for him. They sent out flyers. They shared tears with his mother, Joan, and wrung hands over what-ifs with his father, Bill. They listened and waited and hoped. Those of us on the periphery did the only thing we were programmed to do in those situations — pray — at our evening meals, before bedtime, and every Sunday at mass. But when months stretched into a year without any clues or reliable leads, those prayers graduated from routine appeals to Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and St. Fran-cis (Frank’s namesake) to the serious business of full rosaries and novenas to St. Jude — the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes.

This went on for nine years. For nine years the family languished in uncertainty. They searched instinctively and desperately down lonely avenues leading nowhere. They formulated reasonable scenarios of robbery, drug deals, and mental breakdowns, and far-fetched theories involving amnesia. Because anything was possible, they held out hope, then gave it up dozens of times and regained it only to lose it again in a continuous, tortuous cycle. They carried on by clinging to those fleeting shreds of optimism and anticipation that Frank would just show up one day and everything would be cool again.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JIM COSGROVE, AUTHOR OF

the same stuff — peanut butter or bologna or grilled cheese on white bread.

There our lives intertwined, like a big extended family. We learned together, prayed together, and played together.

All those people, places, faces, names, experiences, sights, and smells were stewed together, for better or for worse, into a cosmic shepherd’s pie.

Our bonds ran deep, and we stayed connected, even after years passed and my family moved a couple of miles away to the outer edge of the neighborhood and my siblings went off to college and moved back home and started careers and got married. The Brookside/St. Peter’s ethos was permanently inscribed in our DNA. So, when Frank McGonigle hopped into his car on a late-spring afternoon in 1982 and drove off without a word to his family, we all felt it. After several days of no communication from Frank, the news began to spread throughout our tight-knit community. Our hearts ached with his family under the weight of their deepest fears. We all began to feel the slow creep of a sympathetic pall settling over our neighborhood, and we all secretly whispered prayers of thanks that this fate had bypassed our doors.

Although I didn’t know Frank well — he was nine years older — it still felt like one of my own brothers or cousins had gone missing.

After a couple of weeks, we knew something had gone wrong. The faithful legions of church friends and neighbors rallied around the McGonigles by

Throwing Stones

“Those of us on the periphery did the only thing we were programmed to do in those situations — pray.”

J

ust south of the blinkering neon of Myrtle Beach, there’s an old clamming town called Murrells Inlet. It’s a place where locals pull their living from the salt marshes and where you’ll find a street lined with biker bars named Suck Bang Blow and The Big Beaver. In a little clearing in the woods outside this town, a son from one of south Kansas City’s best-known families was murdered.

At age twenty-six, Frank McGonigle emptied his bank account and left the family home in Brookside after an argument with his brother over the type of soap used to mop the floors of the family’s butcher shop. A few days later, Frank was passing through the Inlet, where he was robbed and shot twice. His body was stripped of identifying documents, and the killers ditched his car up in Wilmington, with Frank’s golf clubs and tennis racket still in the trunk.

For nine years, as the McGonigle family fretted Frank’s fate, Murrells Inlet police made an effort to identify the body they knew only as “The Boy In The Woods.”

Three men are suspected of being involved. Cousins Chris Nance and Tommy McDowell were the sons of the local crime boss and a sheriff’s deputy, respectively. Around the time of the murder, they’d been palling around with a local outcast named Jeff McKenzie. All three are now dead, having all met early and painful ends.

This story is the subject of Ripple, a new book by local author Jim Cosgrove.

Cosgrove grew up in Brookside, where his family was tight with the McGonigles.

He started on the story as a reporter in New Mexico, and he finished the first draft of the book for his master’s thesis.

During the pandemic, Cosgrove—you may know his alter ego, a children’s musician named Mr. Stinky Feet—finished the book, which is now being published by Steerforth, a respected small press based in New Hampshire. Along with this excerpt, we spoke to Cosgrove about the project.

What was the transition to true crime like? I always tried to keep in mind that this is a story about a guy who was

murdered. It’s a gritty, sad story. And there is a family that’s grieving. I wanted to keep that in perspective. I’ve struggled a bit with these types of stories as entertainment, too.

Because of my personal investment— my family’s connection to the McGonigle family—I have a different perspective on the story, and I think it makes it different from a lot of true crime. For a long time, I never considered it a true crime story—until we got close to publication and that’s where it fell. It’s more of a memoir, really, and a story about family and grief and struggle and guilt and coming to terms with those things.

The book has two separate groups of characters: One is an upstanding Brookside family, and the other is this group of people in South Carolina who are the dregs of society—liars, drug dealers, murderers, racists. What was it like to enter this world? Well, not all members of these families were liars or drug dealers or murderers or racists. I met some very lovely people who went out of their way to help me. But going into this as a young, Midwestern, Catholic-school-boy journalist, yes, there was a bit of culture shock. And through the process, and really through the years of getting into the heads of the suspects in this murder, I really came out of it with this heavy sense of compassion. Which surprised me a bit. I ended in a place of compassion. How did, in particular, these three guys who were suspected of being involved get to this point and why? What were their lives like? Had I been born there, would I have been in the same kind of mindset?

One of your sources calls it the “Murrells Inlet Mafia.” It seemed to me there was a touch of irony, but that’s really what it was, right? It was indeed. Paul Nance was a small-town crime boss.

I believe it was Chris, his son, who said that to me: “My dad was the local mafia boss.”

Do you think Frank McGonigle, who was murdered not long after he arrived in this town, understood the people he was engaging with? Frank was trusting.

He wasn’t naive; he was just a loving, trusting soul. He was worldly enough.

He’d hitchhiked by himself all over the West. He’d had a lot of experience with the world. But it just didn’t compute with him that people were like this. He tended to give people the benefit of the doubt. He moved through the world like that, so he assumed others would treat him the same way.

I think part of the fascination with these types of stories is that if you went to Murrells Inlet today—well, now it’s loaded with high-end condos and great seafood restaurants—but even if you went there then, you wouldn’t suspect it either.

I looked up news coverage of the death of Chris Nance, and he himself was brutally murdered. Those stories never mentioned that his father was a local crime boss. How is the town going to react to its business being put out there for the first time? It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out and if I will be welcome there again. As I think I got across in the book, everybody there knew Paul Nance, and everybody kind of knew what he was doing. But the fact that they were never able to pin any of it on him tells you he was in the pocket of local law enforcement, which is how these things go.

Whenever secrets are revealed or dirty laundry is aired, there is going to be backlash and there is going to be some defensiveness and gnashing of teeth, but also I think there is going to be some introspection because I’ve already interviewed people who were like, “Yeah, you know, this makes us look at what’s gone down.”

A lot has changed since then. It’s no longer like that. Paul is long gone, his empire is long gone, but the stories about him will live on as legends.

Obviously, the book makes all of these people into legends, in a way. It’s been such a big part of my life for so long that it’s almost surreal now that it’s being published. Man, it’s been a long time.

But I’ve changed a lot since I first got on the story. I went into it like I did a lot of things as a young man: bright-eyed and with good intentions and, as a journalist, trying not to get sucked into the story—just observe and report. But I got sucked in.

PAGE 71 . KANSAS CITY MAGAZINE

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Next Steps to Finding the Perfect Summer Camp 78

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Summer at Barstow Kansas City’s favorite summer camps for kids ages 3-14!

Choose from 600+offerings. Campers love Summer at Barstow’s action-packed adventures in creative arts, athletics, academics and STEAM, plus field trips to the city’s best attractions. Parents love our experienced instructors, 4:1 camper-to-staff ratio and extended care options. Summer at Barstow offers camps for every budget, age, interest, and schedule. Extended care available. May 23-Aug. 12.

11511 State Line Rd., Kansas City 816.277.0445 barstowschool.org/summer

Camp Invention Thanks to amazing reviews from parents, teachers and most of all – campers, Camp Invention is back!

Spark your kid’s creativity and confidence with Camp Invention’s exclusive program, Explore! Campers in grades K-6 collaborate with friends in hands-on, openended STEM adventures designed to inspire curiosity, stretch imaginations and give your explorer an epic summer experience. They’ll dive into ocean research with their own robotic fish, develop inventions for space exploration, build a spinning robot artist, and design a mega-marble arcade! There are a limited number of spots available and they fill up quickly.

Multiple locations 800.968.4332 invent.org/save

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SUMMER CAMP GUIDE ‘22

Camps For Kids Camps for Kids works to assure that no Kansas City area child will be turned away from summer camp because of low income or physical or developmental disabilities. Founded by Marjorie Powell All in 1981 when the Federal government discontinued a program providing summer camp to children with disabilities or financial need at no cost to their families.

Children attending Camp for Kids are transformed by the learning, growth, and acceptance from camp. To be among peers who share similar life challenges is comforting and fosters interpersonal growth. Camp also bridges the learning loss between school years.

Many camps have a specific medical focus including chronic kidney disease, autism spectrum disorders, spina bifida, cancer, foster care children, bereavement therapy, visual impairment, developmental challenges, neuromuscular diseases, and congenital heart disease. Several camps have an arts focus such as mixed media and dance. Most camps have small staffs and utilize volunteers to conduct their activities. They focus on providing outstanding camping experiences for the children.

Few camps have dedicated personnel to raise the needed funds to support the camp’s programs.

Camps for Kids support is critical to their continued operation and success.

816.839.6496 campsforkids.org

Church of the Resurrection Vacation Bible Camp at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection this summer offers a week where children attend HERO University for four days of fun, friendship and faith-building.

Children will experience Super-HERO lessons from the greatest hero of all–Jesus!

Vacation Bible Camp is a fun week filled with Bible stories, games, music, crafts, service projects and an end of camp surprise celebration. Church of the Resurrection currently plans to offer Vacation Bible Camp at each of their five locations in the

greater Kansas City area – Leawood, Downtown Kansas City, Blue Springs, Overland Park and Olathe.

Parents are always welcome to join the fun as volunteers for The Great Adventure, as children learn important lessons from the Bible about trusting God, persevering, and serving others. Suitable for all children preschool through grade 5. Camp runs from Monday, July 18th through Thursday, July 21.

Various locations throughout the city 913.897.0120 cor.org/VBC2021

City of Leawood The City of Leawood Parks, Recreation and Cultural Arts Department is offering a variety of camps for all ages and interests. This summer you can sign-up for creative and engaging art camps, including the popular “Art Party” and “Little Artists” camps located in the Community Center on the lower level of City Hall. Have a sports superstar in the

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SUMMER CAMP GUIDE ‘22

making? Be sure to sign them up for “Super Sports” and “Challenger Soccer” camps. For children ages 9-11 who aren’t afraid of heights, sign them up for the awesome “Challenge Adventure Camp” which takes place on the giant climbing walls and ropes course at Ironwoods Park. Don’t forget the outdoorsy kids with our curiosity inspiring nature camps including the “Half Day Nature Camp”. This year they will also be launching our “Rocket Kids Camp” where kids ages 8-12 will learn how to build their very own rocket.

Increased staff, and social distancing will be used so everyone can enjoy the fun safely.

Various Locations throughout Leawood 913.663.1954 leawood.org

Kansas City Missouri Parks & Recreation Get ready for a summer full of fun at the Kansas City Park and Recreation’s Summer Enrichment Camps. Ten-week day camps are a great chance for kids ages 6-13 to stay socially, mentally, and physically active. Campers enjoy educational enrichment opportunities, crafts, games and safe socialization. The health and safety of staff and campers is the utmost priority so Kansas City, Missouri Parks and Recreation follows CDC guidelines for all programs. Summer camp is $80 per week with lunch and snacks provided. Camps are conveniently located at five KC Parks

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Community Centers throughout the city including Hillcrest, Kansas City North, Southeast, Tony Aguirre, Westport Roanoke Community Center. Scholarships are available.

Various locations throughout Kansas City kcparks.org

KC Watersports You will find Kansas City’s premier wakeboarding, wakeskating and watersports school at KC Watersports. All Summer Camps are taught at their Cable Park Facility on one of our two cable lakes located just South of Spring Hill, KS. Camps are held daily Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. Their passion is teaching people how to enjoy watersports at every level. They have the facilities and staff in place to ensure that every rider, regardless of skill level, can learn something new. Whether you’re new to the sport and have never ridden any kind of board before to the advanced rider wanting to learn a new flip or twist KC Watersports camp will fit every level of rider.

Included with camp is instruction from top level coaches, all of the necessary gear, and a light lunch. Campers must bring a positive attitude, swimwear, sunscreen and a towel.

25825 Edgemore, Paola, Kan. 913.783.4300 kcwatersports.com

Rockhurst Summer at the Rock is a unique experience for both elementary students and High School students. The grade school athletic camps include: baseball, basketball, football, lacrosse, soccer and wrestling. The grade school academic program offers: future scientist, HSPT prep, musical theater, robotics, science enrichment and study skills.

The High School student courses include: Magis academy, PSAT prep, summer credit, academic courses.

9301 State Line Rd., Kansas City 816.363.2036 rockhursths.edu

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SEAING IS BELIEVING

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CALEB CONDIT & REBECCA NORDEN

During the late ’80s boom in boneless, skinless chicken—the era where pork was “the other white meat”—tuna was marketed as “the chicken of the sea.” That may have been a fair characterization of the smallest species, albacore. Bigger species are very much the buffalo of the sea: big, lumbering beasts who stomp their habitats in massive herds and offer up meaty pink flesh. The tuna tartare appetizer at the brand-new Ocean Prime relies on that meatiness, adapting a classic beef dish to aquatic environs. It works rather beautifully, with chunks of bigeye tuna neatly laid atop a fatty layer of avocado, a crunchy layer of paper-thin fried wonton and a kiddy pool of ginger ponzu sauce. — MART I N CI Z MAR

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There is no reason to mourn: These new businesses should help reenergize an area that is still feeling the effects of the ongoing pandemic. You’re going to feel a lot less depressed walking past a brightly lit building than you will catching your reflection in its darkened windows. And there are still locals who are willing to put some skin in the game. This month, we check in with three new, locally owned Westport operations.

LIGHTS ON WESTPORT Welcoming three new restaurants to Kansas City’s oldest neighborhood

BY N ATA L I E TO R R E S G A L L AG H E R P H OTO G R A P H Y BY C A L E B C O N D I T & R E B E C C A N O R D E N

S

I N C E K E L LY ’ S W E S T P O R T I N N O P E N E D in one of Kansas City’s oldest buildings at the intersection of Westport Road and Pennsylvania Avenue in 1947, the district has seen many iterations of its identity— from family-friendly shopping destination (Pryde’s has operated since 1968) to hip restaurant harbor (RIP Prospect of Westport) to late-night party precinct (Johnny Kaw’s and the other Johnny Kaw’s). Lately, the neighborhood seems to have more appeal to out-of-town developers than locals: Denver-based Atomic Provisions took over the former City Ice House building in the summer of 2020. This spring, Nashville-based Tin Roof, an indoor-outdoor music venue, will open where Sailor Jack’s used to be. And of course, there is the new Taco Bell Cantina at the bottom of the Westley on Broadway apartments.

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Guy’s Pizza and Deli If your heart broke when Joe’s Pizza shuttered in December after twenty-four years of feeding Westport’s drunken slobs, there’s good news for you: You can still get a slice of Joe’s original pepperoni (drizzled with honey, of course) from the new tenant, Guy’s Pizza and Deli, which opened in the same location in January. Owner Andy Miller obtained Joe’s original pizza recipe but opted to upgrade all ingredients, changing the finished product for the better.

He also retained the entire Joe’s staff.

But there is one very important addition to the space: sandwiches.

Guy’s offers several classics. You will find a glorious Italian sub loaded with no fewer than five cold cuts— prosciutto, pepperoni, mortadella, finocchio, salame—plus provolone, giardiniera peppers and all the other vegetables you’d find in an Italian kitchen. There’s a Reuben, of course, and a PLT, which is basically a BLT but with thick-cut pancetta instead of bacon, which is pretty genius.

There are the basics to appeal to the masses, including a hot ham, beef and cheese or veggie panini.

Sandwiches do not automatically come with a bag of Guy’s chips.

And if you are one of those wise, cultured few who appreciates the absolute glory of a crunchy potato chip on a sandwich, well, do yourself the ultimate favor and go for the PB&J Crunch. Imagine: peanut butter and grape jelly slathered on wheat, layered with perfectly crisp and liberally seasoned barbecue chips. This combination is crushed together in a panini press, delivered to you in a basket with a

pickle spear and, of course, a bag of Guy’s chips. You are drinking something cheap—a yard beer you would never order anywhere else, but somehow that PBR is as refreshing as you need it to be when you bite into the so-bad-it’s-good, sweet-savory unholy matrimony of warm peanut butter, gooey jelly and Worcestershire-imbued fried potato shavings. It does not look all that appetizing—just a sort of smushed, skinny earth-toned triangle with brown panini press lines—and it shouldn’t make sense. But the flavors come together in your mouth, and it’s not PB&J with BBQ chips: It’s bite-sized nostalgia, some long-lost childhood afternoon that you taste and remember and feel, like the sensation of running through a sprinkler or chasing down the ice cream truck.

And you get to tear into it while you throw back an adult beverage, which is the kind of full-circle experience everyone needs once a lifetime (or once a week, depending on how often you find yourself at Kelly’s).

Miller keeps Guy’s as local as possible. Meats are sourced locally, bread is from Farm to Market. You can order slices and sandwiches from the walk-up window on Pennsylvania Avenue, or you can enjoy them from a stool at Kelly’s.

Westport Fish & Chips If you were going to illustrate joy, it might look like a funnel cake: a chaotic scribble, some powdered sugar pointillism, maybe a squiggly flourish to suggest a drizzle of hot caramel or berry sauce if you were at one of those fancy state fairs that had a line around the

cart. Sure, it’s a chaotic mass of deepfried dough that retains no life or flavor five minutes past its birthdate, but if it lasts longer than five minutes, you’re eating that funnel cake wrong, loser.

The nice thing about Westport Fish & Chips is that you get all the benefits of carnival favorites without actually having to go to a carnival. There is that joyous funnel cake, and you can enjoy it at this eatery’s four-seat counter when it’s hot from the fryer.

Of course, most people go to Westport Fish & Chips for the fish, and it’s very good here. You can get cod, catfish or shrimp, beer-battered and deep-fried and served with tangy tartar sauce.

Order it spicy—with chili powder and Old Bay mixed into the batter—for a satisfying kick. Fries are bulk-ordered and frozen, but they’re crispy and salted, and they’re not meant to be the star of the show, anyway.

Westport Fish & Chips opened in July, and it shares a kitchen with Chick-in Waffle, located next door. Both fast-casual eateries are owned by Farid Azzeh, who has also owned and run Westport mainstay Jerusalem Cafe since 1990.

Farid’s son Anas Azzeh manages both Chick-in Waffle and Westport Fish & Chips. He’s added a handful of other state fair staples to the menu—mozzarella sticks, honey-battered corn dogs, fried Oreos—that should help sponge up any of the poor decisions you made at one of the bars down the street.

The Peacock Some things sound like they have no chance of working—like a warm peanut butter-jelly-barbecue chip panini—and end in harmony.

Left: Guys Pizza and Deli Top Left: Westport Fish & Chips Top Right: The Peacock

Other things sound good in theory but fall apart in practice, like me with bangs—or the items I ate at two visits to the Peacock two months apart.

The new restaurant from Jeffrey Schmitz and Gene Switzer, owners of Bistro 303 next door, opened in the former Ragazza space in December.

The layout has not changed since its days as an Italian taverna. There are still just forty-eight seats, including the slender bar, behind which hangs a television permanently displaying a bright male peacock in all his glory.

Befitting the peacock theme, this is a place that wants to show off its plumage in aggressive and sometimes bizarre ways. Chef Brian Mehl (formerly of Plate in Brookside) has plucked elements from global cuisines and smashed them together with a strange confidence.

There are some perplexing options, such as hummus whipped together with beet puree and goat cheese and garnished, inexplicably, with paper-thin taro chips and crunchy brittle candy pieces. The tom kha gai—coconut broth soup from Thailand—contains gluey shiso noodles and smoked duck. On the happy hour menu, perfectly crispy calamari is served not with aioli for dipping but atop a bitter brown mole. The happy hour salmon was particularly baffling: Cooked, shredded and chilled salmon is mixed with mayo and sprinkled with olive tapenade and fried potatoes. Why? Peacock’s vegetable dishes rise above the fray. Fried Brussels tossed in a beet-molasses syrup are quite tasty, and the chilled happy hour broccolini is uncomplicated and flavorful. And the bar is fully stocked with beer, wine and cocktails.

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TA S T E PER FECT DAY

James Chang, restaurant GM and food entrepreneur, is on a mission to educate Kansas Citians about Taiwanese cuisine.

BY DA N I E L L E L E H M A N

T H E F OO D I N D U STRY H AS A LWAYS B E E N HO ME TO

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, and spending his childhood in many cities across the U.S., the forty-two-year-old general manager of Waldo Thai was more or less raised in his grandmother’s rice shop, the noodle factory where his dad was employed and multiple American-Chinese restaurants where his family worked. “I basically grew up in a commercial Chinese kitchen,” Chang says. Everything in his life revolved around food and the hospitality industry. When Chang was just eight or nine years old, he asked his dad for a bicycle for his birthday, but instead, his dad handed him a step stool. “He wished me a happy birthday and said, ‘Now you can reach the deep fryer baskets.’” Those experiences helped James find his calling to produce and sell his own chili oil, a venture which now sells out in just hours when a new batch is released.

JA M E S C H A NG .

You’ve managed to develop two cult followings—your loyal customers at Waldo Thai and now the fans of your chili oil business. How do you develop those relationships? I’ve been the GM and not-so-handyman at Waldo Thai since before we had the gas connected. I said yes to the job because Pam and Ted [Liberda] offered me a chance to be part of a team that would change the face of Thai food in Kansas City. I’m horrible with customers’ names, but I will remember what you ordered the last time you were in. My whole service ethos is to try and make you feel like you’re visiting a friend or a family’s house—relaxed, full of chuckles and, most importantly, to send you home “fat kid wasted.”

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You clearly have a passion for sharing food with people. Why is food such a powerful way for you to build connections with people?

I still remember the stories my grandma told me about being hungry and trying to figure out how to feed six kids with nothing, so food for my family is more than just nutrition. It’s about wellbeing and happiness. Also, growing up Asian, the words “I love you” were never spoken. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve heard “I love you” from my family. Love, especially with my dad and grandma, was shown with food.

P E R F E C T DAY Quality Coffee I would start my day at Blip Roasters for the sole reason that I love how their coffee beans taste.

Family Meal I love Family Cabin in Belton. It’s a very old-school diner that serves chicken fried steaks, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, fried okra, fried pickles and pancakes the size of manhole covers.

Dinner I love how Antler Room incorporates Asian flavors. Some upscale restaurants have great food that lacks soul—so thought out that it lacks a certain warmth. Antler Room always manages to elevate the execution while keeping the essence of a dish.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CALEB CONDIT AND REBECCA NORDEN

STRIKING OIL

How did you get into the chili oil business? It was kind of a fluke. I used to buy chili oil from the Asian store until one day I saw the ingredient labels and realized there were a lot of additives in them. I thought maybe I could do better than that. We never did chili oil at my dad’s restaurants—I actually learned the basics by watching an old Cantonese cook I used to work with many eons ago. I try to source ingredients that are minimally processed, and I personally make all batches by hand. I’ve been really lucky with word of mouth and publicity. Now here I am, hand-bottling, -labeling, and -shipping four hundred-plusbottle batches.

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TA S T E DR I N K

BERRY SUBTLE At the Black Shire of middle Missouri, the gins come by the quarter.

BY M A R T I N C I Z M A R

AMERICAN GIN IS A VERY BROAD A N D L O O S E C AT E G O R Y —pretty

much anything goes as far as botanicals are concerned, so long as a hint of juniper berry is “perceptible.”

Hermann’s Black Shire Distillery is one of the state’s best distilleries, with the pot tended by Derek LeRoy. His father, Paul LeRoy, has been the winemaker at sister business Hermannhof Winery for four decades.

For his new line of quarterly seasonal gins, Derek could go about as far afield as he wanted so long as a little juniper remained perceptible. A winter gin that’s

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groggy with baking spices? A super citrusy spring offering that could go racing into a greyhound? That’s not what he wanted to do. Rather, his two new gins have the same backbone, with plenty of juniper accented by a burst of bitter citrus. They’re riffs on the same refrain, wearing their family resemblance proudly even as the spring offering goes a little more into lemony and orangey territory while the winter one lays back with touches of clove and allspice.

March is shoulder season, and if you’re lucky, you might be able to find both at Black Shire’s tasting room a block from the old train station in Hermann.

TA S T E B I T E S

Ting’s Filipino Bistro

Proving It at Parlor Kansas City proper has been without a standing Filipino restaurant since KC Pinoy closed in the West Bottoms and Manila Bay Express moved to Grandview. That’s changed thanks to Theresa “Ting” Santos-Spencer, who is now serving staples like lumpia, spamsilog and adobo at Ting’s Filipino Bistro in the Crossroads’ Parlor food hall. Santos-Spencer is hoping to open a full-size restaurant in Midtown, at 1803 W. 39th St., in the former Blue Koi Noodles & Dumplings space, she told the Star.

NEWSFEED

WHAT’S NEW IN KANSAS CITY FOOD & DRINK

PHOTOS PROVIDED BY RESPETIVE VENUES

The Brady Brunch The city’s newest Irish restaurant, Brady & Fox, will be open for St. Patrick’s Day—or there will be a funeral instead. “If it kills me we’re going to make it,” says Shaun Brady. “Please print that: if it kills me.”

Brady should be fine. His “worst, worst-case scenario” is that St. Paddy’s will be celebrated with a small menu at the chef-driven concept, which he and co-owner Graham Farris, a longtime buddy who is also a chef, call an “Irish-American restaurant and lounge.”

Brady is best known from Brady’s on Troost, which carried his name but where he was only a minor partner. That spot won a lot of fans in Brookside, a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood. The new restaurant will sit at 63rd and Troost, in the former Brookside Poultry Co. space. Although the whiskey collection will start small at Brady & Fox, Brady’s last project was especially popular with whiskey geeks—its collection of rare Irish whiskeys was only rivaled by a bar called The Dead Rabbit in lower Manhattan. “When we closed, we had a hundred and ten bottles of Irish whiskey on the shelf,” he says. “That was the most Irish whiskey by the pour in the U.S.” Brady and Farris (“The ‘Fox’ comes around because his mom’s maiden name is Fox,” Brady says) have been working together for a decade, starting at the Ambassador Hotel and continuing with Brady’s and Conroy’s Public House together.

Brady & Fox will be focused on the food, with the chefowners hoping to showcase their talents. The lounge area in the back will be designed for diners to take a drink before moving into the main room, where they’ll be able to get meat pies or fish and chips, plus, on weekends, cuts from a whole leg of lamb roasted on the former tenant’s rotisserie. There are plans to do a full Irish breakfast after the opening rush slows.

“I was tired of asking people questions, ‘Can we?’” says Brady. “Now it’s my place so, yes, we can.”

Something Fishy

Plant Parm The newest spot in the Northland’s Iron District food cart pod has been “seven years in the making.”

That’s how long it’s been since Landon Isabell started doing vegan Italian pop-ups at his house in Portland, Oregon. Isabell moved to Kansas City during the pandemic and opened his plant-based Italian project, Landoplenty, which was inspired by his upbringing: “My second dad is Italian and owned Italian restaurants for over thirty years. I got creative, veganized his dishes and Landoplenty came to be.”

Italian food tends to make heavy use of cheese, and Isabell says it’s hard to get vegan cheeses that taste right. “Luckily, I’ve been vegan for ten years now and I’ve had that much time to experiment,” he says. “My biggest hurdle has been mastering the pastas, which require tedious dough-making and lots of muscle. But I’ve got it down now!”

Look for more from Isabell in the future, possibly including a latenight vegan drive-thru and a kava bar. “I have about twenty different projects in the pipes,” he says. “I’m a Gemini, so it comes naturally.”

The closure of a sushi chain restaurant in the Power & Light district might not normally cause much of a kerfuffle. But the abrupt end of the Drunken Fish became the talk of the local food scene after the restaurant’s general manager took to social media.

Joshua Wilson, who has identified himself as the former general manager, said that there were “several red flags” that made employees and management wonder if the restaurant was in danger of closing. On February 3, he even emailed his boss to ask about those red flags.

“I asked head office if there were plans to close the location and if the staff should start looking for new jobs,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “I was told, ‘No. There is nothing to worry about.’”

The next day, he and other managers were asked to come to the restaurant at 10 pm to turn in their keys.

“These weren’t just employees of a restaurant,” Wilson wrote on a GoFundMe page. “These were people with lives and responsibilities. Companies ask staff to give two weeks’ notice of leaving a position and I feel that the same two weeks should have been given to the staff.”

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TH E SCE N E BEAT THE BLUES GAL A

The Scene HAPPENINGS IN KANSAS CITY

Beat the Blues On January 29, Sherwood Autism Center hosted its fifth annual Beat the Blues gala to raise money to support its mission of educating and empowering children and adults with autism. Guests attended the event both in-person and virtually, donning creative blue attire. Fund-A-Need, a live and silent auction, was held alongside the Golden Ticket raffle to support Sherwood’s music therapy program, lunch program and remote learning technology needs. All proceeds will directly help the children and adults that Sherwood Autism Center serves in its special education and adult services programs, which promote independence in family and community life. “We are always amazed and grateful to the Kansas City community for the support they provide Sherwood so that we can help others thrive,” CEO Laci Maltbie says.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY BALEIGH THOMPSON

SURREAL ESTATE T H E S TO R I E S B E H I N D K A N S A S C I T Y ’ S M O S T E Y E - C ATC H I N G B U I L D I N G S

SPLASH ZONE Who are the kids depicted in the Northland’s Children’s Fountain?

D ED I CAT IO N, D R EN ’S N O RTH

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3 2 ND AV E NUE , at the north end of downtown North Kansas City, was said to be the “largest fountain of its kind in America.” The fountain pumps five and a half thousand gallons of water per minute and at the time ran year-round, despite frigid winter weather. An event program from its dedication noted that the hundred-foot Children’s Fountain was only the second fountain to be built north of the Missouri River and would be the first adorned with original sculptures.

Those sculptures—six larger-than-life bronze sculptures of children frolicking across an oval-shaped pond—are what most people notice now. The children depicted weren’t just picked from the sky but were modeled after locals.

It was an ambitious project for the time, even for the folks spearheading the effort, which included Anita Gorman, a powerhouse parks commissioner, and Charles Garney of Briarcliff Development and Garney Construction. Both were tireless advocates of the Northland.

Sitting on an island-like triangular spec of land surrounded by roads, the fountain was the result of a massive fundraising campaign by the North-

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land’s power brokers. It cost close to $2 million at the time, which is more than $3 million in today’s dollars.

The statues are meant to personify the “hope, joy and promise of our growing community.” With that in mind, Gorman and Garney enlisted the help of local sculptor Tom Corbin and set to work.

The smallest of the statues is shown tentatively putting one toe in the water and was modeled after Aubree Collins, a student at the Northland’s Eastgate Middle School. Her father, Paul Collins, worked for the city’s Parks Department.

The soccer player statue is Tom McClung and was donated by his

mother, Susan Perry. The ballerina is Jill James Skjervem, daughter of Gerald James. The Speas Foundation paid for the sculpture of the boy shown with crutches in the air. The handstand sculpture “looks at the world from all angles, as children do,”and was underwritten by the Kansas City Southern Railroad, according to the event program.

The leader of the pack and the largest of the figures is Joy. Standing at ten feet tall, she symbolizes Garney’s six daughters and was said to be a “tribute” to the “freedom which today challenges young women to be all that they can be,” notes the program. —DAWNYA BARTSCH

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF KC PARKS

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