According to Doug Worgul, K.C. barbecue historian extraordinaire and author of a great book about it calledThe Grand Barbecue, a fellow named Henry Perry started it all in Kansas City in 1907. An interesting twist to the story is that Henry Perry was born near Memphis, Tennessee, another great barbecue city At some point Henry Perry had three restaurants and one of them was being run by Charlie Bryant, Arthur Bryant’s older brother. Arthur Bryant also worked for Mr. Perry, and so did a man named Arthur Pinkard. More about him later. When Henry Perry died in 1940, one of his restaurants became Charlie Bryant’s. In 1946, when Charlie Bryant retired, it became Arthur Bryant’s. It has since become a treasured landmark in K.C., once called “The Best Damn Restaurant in the World” by Calvin Trillin and frequented by American presidents and countless celebs. An interesting story about Bryant’s is that the famous K.C. burnt ends were created there. When you were in line you could just scoop up some of the crumbled stuff that fell off the slicer and put it on your plate. It’s now a very popular dish in Kansas City and is usually made up of the point muscle, cubed and cooked a little longer than the flat muscle, which is sliced.

About that same time, in 1946, a man named George Gates bought a K.C. restaurant named Ol’ Kentuck Bar-B-Q. The pitmaster at Ol’ Kentuck was Arthur Pinkard, who had previously worked the pit for Henry Perry The Gates family say they learned about barbecue from Mr. Pinkard, and that’s why his picture hangs in all of their restaurants. The story sometimes gets mixed up to say that George Gates and Arthur Bryant both worked for Henry Perry but that’s just not true. The connection is Arthur Pinkard, who is largely unknown but a very important man in the history of Kansas City barbecue. In 1960, George Gates died, and the business has been headed by Ollie Gates ever since. Ollie Gates is a K.C. legend in his own right and has even appeared onThe Martha Stewart Show, where he showed Martha how to cook real Kansas City barbecue. Gates has grown to be the bigger of the two K.C. legends, if not the most famous, and their sauce business is huge. They have six full-service restaurants in the Kansas City area and all are doing very well. When you walk in the door of a Gates restaurant, you will immediately hear a server yell, “Hi, may I help you?” They don’t necessarily expect you to order right away it’s just how they like to greet you at Gates. It’s a warm welcome to hear, and I usually respond by saying “I’ll have a slab, no pickle, and a red soda.” By the way, there are no burnt ends at Gates. Mr. Gates says, “We try not to burn our meat.”

The American Royal is a 100-plus-year-old livestock show and a month-long festival that surrounds it. It’s held at the American Royal Complex in an area of Kansas City called The Bottoms, and it’s right where the old stockyards were. One of the events is the American Royal Barbecue cookoff, and it’s a doozie. It all started in 1980, which was clearly the early days of barbecue cookoffs. The first one was held in the parking lot of the legendary K.C. steak house The Golden Ox, but the cookoff moved over to the big parking lots outside the American Royal building long ago. These days, when the first weekend in October rolls around, all the big names in competitive barbecue load up their cookers and head for Kansas City The team count is over five hundred, the prize money is over $80,000, and the party is herculean. It’s often called “The World Series of Barbecue” and it boasts the largest field of competitors anywhere. The amount of beer and barbecue that is consumed that weekend is outrageous. There are bands set up to play in many of the booths, and because of the random nature of the placement, you may see two bands standing next to each other playing in different booths. Now that’s a party! They even have an award for the Best Party of the Year. I’ve never quite figured out how they judge this category, but they always have a winner. Aside from the typical KCBS categories, they have sausage, dessert, and a big side dish contest. The side dish contest involves three categories and is taken very seriously by the cooks. The categories are Potatoes, Beans, and Vegetables. There are also awards for the overall of the three, a Grand Champion of barbecue side dishes.

I once had the pleasure of the Rub Me Tender team from Detroit joining me at the Royal to cook my side dishes. They did very well with a perfect score in the potato category, and I’m pleased to include their recipe here. I’ve also included a winning vegetable recipe from Linda at Smokin’ Guns and a first-place bean recipe from 2005 from Sausage-Fest BBQ.

The Kansas City Barbeque Society has had a huge influence on the growth of competitive barbecue. Certainly Food TV and the Internet have given a big push in recent years, but KCBS was promoting cookoffs before most of us had ever heard of them. Carolyn Wells tells me that she was working for Wicker’s, a barbecue sauce company when she first encountered the Memphis in May cookoff in the early eighties. It was and still is an extravaganza. Meanwhile, some other folks from Kansas City had also heard about MIM and they decided to have their own cookoff, now fondly known as the American Royal. One day in 1985 Carolyn, her husband, Gary, and a friend named Rick Welch decided there was so much interest in this that they needed to start a barbecue club. They named it the Kansas City Barbeque Society and declared that the number one rule would be that nothing would be taken too seriously That would be grounds for disqualification. They started their own cookoff in 1986 called Spring Training, and because this was all in fun they charged $69 to enter. Everyone got meat to cook and a cooler and there were small trophies. I was lucky enough to attend one of the last Spring Training cookoffs.

According to Carolyn, it ended after ten years because it just wasn’t needed anymore. You see, things grew up all around KCBS. Lots of people were organizing cookoffs, and KCBS had become the premier barbecue cookoff-sanctioning body By the mid-nineties things were growing way past the boundaries of Kansas City, with cookoffs in Illinois, Tennessee, Washington State, and even California. The word was spreading fast. By about 2001 KCBS was sanctioning 100 cookoffs a year and boasted 3,000 members from all over the world. But it wasn’t slowing down. Five years later those numbers were double, with 200 cookoffs and 6,000 members, and it’s still not slowing down. Gary and Carolyn Wells have put many years of time and effort into KCBS, and we all owe them a lot of thanks. Carolyn told me a story today while we were talking about a friend of ours named Buddy Babb. Seems recently someone asked Buddy about KCBS and he replied that it had changed his life. Buddy and his son Charlie won the World Barbecue Association Championship in 2000 and now run a successful barbecue restaurant in Nashville. KCBS has changed my life, too. Without KCBS I seriously doubt that I could make my living writing about and cooking barbecue. There are many others on the list of people who have had their lives changed by KCBS, too. The world of competition barbecue is very healthy thanks to the Kansas City Barbeque Society

Combine and mix well.

1 cup sugar
1 cupnoniodizedtable
salt
½ cup brown sugar (dried
out lightly by exposing
on a cookie sheet for
several hours at room
temperature, or slightly
warmed)
5 tablespoons plus
1 teaspoon chili powder
2 tablespoons plus
2 teaspoons ground cumin
4 teaspoons MSG (Accent)
4 teaspoons cayenne
pepper
4 teaspoons black pepper,
freshly ground (important)
4 teaspoons garlic powder
4 teaspoons onion powder
1 rack of IBP brand
loin baby back ribs
(1¾ to 2 pounds),
membrane on the inner
side removed and all
excess fat trimmed

Bichelmeyer’s is a big old-fashioned butcher shop, like the places that many of us remember from long ago. Now I mean a real butcher shop, where they have hanging sides of beef in the back and hogs and lambs. They cut these into retail cuts, some of which are rarely seen anymore. You see, most meat these days is broken down into large primal cuts at the big processing plants and then shipped to the local stores to be cut into steaks, chops, etc. I understand the need for this and they do a very good job, but one of my “beefs” with it is that they leave most of the bones behind. They just make it harder for the local meat cutter. Unfortunately, most folks don’t really care. That’s why you’ll rarely see a bone-in pot roast, sirloin steak, or round steak anymore. I don’t like that! The bones are an important part in some cooking techniques and I miss them. So when I go to Bichelmeyer’s I buy a sirloin steak that has the bone in, or a bone-in pot roast, and most definitely some sausage. That’s another great thing about an old-fashioned butcher shop. They make their own sausage, and Bichelmeyer’s even has a smokehouse to finish some of them up. I’m not talking about some wimpy little smoker like they have in the grocery stores. I’m talking about a whole room where you roll in big carts of sausage to smoke. It’s very cool.

Bichelmeyer’s Meats is not very far from the old stockyards and right near the location of the American Royal, so I visit Matt Bichelmeyer about every time I get to Kansas City They’ll cut you any kind of special trim you want, and are happy to do it. That’s why so many of the top cookoff guys in Kansas City stop there. I live in Florida now, where they grow lots of beef, but I can’t find a butcher like Bichelmeyer’s anywhere. On a recent visit I met Matt’s dad, Joe, and his uncle Jim, all working in the market. When I asked them to get together for a picture they immediately posed under a picture of their father/grandfather that hangs proudly in the shop. The shop has been there since 1946. This is another classic K.C. place that would be hard to find anywhere else.

Jeff and Joy Stehney have built two wonderful barbecue restaurants in the Kansas City area, but I have to start by explaining why they are named Oklahoma Joe’s. There really is an Oklahoma Joe; he’s Joe Davidson and he started a cooking team that grew to become a cooker-building company and a sauce and rub business, and Joe was even part of the original restaurant. It’s a long story but the name lives on in a few different incarnations that Joe is no longer involved with. The good news is the restaurant end of things ended up in the very capable hands of Jeff and Joy

The concept of opening a new barbecue joint in Kansas City is like opening a brothel near the Chicken Ranch. It’s gonna be an uphill battle. But Jeff had made a name for himself cooking in contests under the name Slaughterhouse Five, even winning the American Royal. He’d also been doing a little catering on the side, so he had a built-in clientele in K.C. To help with his catering, he’d rented some space in a gas station that included the use of a walk-in cooler. So one day Jeff decided that this location was a viable spot for a restaurant. He and Joe were partners in a restaurant in Oklahoma at the time, but he wanted something closer to home. So Oklahoma Joe’s in the gas station next to the liquor store on 47th and Mission was born. This is now and forever going to be a famous barbecue address, because long ago it joined the old joints on the list of legendary places to eat barbecue at in Kansas City I recently had dinner at the second Oklahoma Joe’s in Olathe, Kansas, and the food is just as good as in the original, with a little nicer and roomier atmosphere. I think in this newer place the Stehneys have found the perfect combination of real barbecue joint funky mixed with nice restaurant savvy Jeff knows about the sauce and seasoning business as well. His Cowtown brand products are very good and available in specialty and grocery stores throughout the country Jeff has also dabbled in the cookoff organizing business, primarily for fun and as a tool to promote his restaurants. He hosted the cookoff at the Kansas Speedway for a few years, all well-run and well-attended events, but has now turned his sights on the Oklahoma Joe’s World Brisket Championship. The story is that Jeff went to a cookoff in Texas in 1992 and was crowned the World Brisket Champion. He was also given the second-place trophy because the rules allowed the cooks to turn in more than one entry Yes, you understood that correctly A guy from Kansas went to Texas and took the top two places in the World Brisket Championship. I think those Texans were so disappointed that they never had their cookoff again. (Here’s a tip: When you go to Oklahoma Joe’s try the brisket!)

Fast-forward to 2006 and Jeff has resurrected the idea and it will now be held in Kansas with him as the host. You can find info on all of this at wwwoklahomajoesbbq.com.

It’s pretty hard to find a barbecue joint in Kansas City that no one has heard of, but that’s what Jones Bar-B-Q is. I predict it won’t be that way for long, though. My old buddy Fast Eddy was bugging me that we had to go to this place. It’s not that hard to get me to a new barbecue joint, so off we went. It’s a great-looking barbecue joint with a built-in brick pit and a few hardworking cooks right in plain view. There is a nice patio on the side with a live keyboard player out there for lunch when the weather is right. The pitmaster is a lady, Deborah Jones, and her sister, Mary is the nicest waitress in the world. These girls can cook for me anytime. Jones serves real homemade food. They serve the barbecue straight from the pit and slice it to order. There are no holding cabinets or microwaves here. I didn’t ask, but it was obvious that their sauce is homemade, too. It’s yet another K.C. original with the distinct taste of celery seed and it’s delicious. They even make their own sausage daily They also have rib tips, which is unusual for a Kansas City place. The plate of food they give you is huge, but I manage to finish it every time I go there. In typical Kansas City fashion, combinations are very popular here. I like that because I can never decide which one thing I want, especially at Jones. I recommend the ham, pork, brisket, and ribs. You’ll have to narrow it down from there. Mary will bring you a wet nap, a toothpick, and a couple pieces of candy to complete your wonderful meal.

Smokin Guns BBQ Restaurant and Catering Company is a new barbecue joint by Kansas City standards, but they’ve already made their mark in a big way The Smokin’ Guns barbecue team was started in 1997 by Linda and Phil Hopkins, a very nice couple from Kansas City They became very good soon after and in 1999 they competed in and won the Jack Daniel’s World Championship, which is arguably the most coveted of all barbecue awards. (I know it’s my most coveted.) Then they began to sell their incredibly popular barbecue rub and, last but certainly not least, came the restaurant. Smokin’ Guns BBQ opened on January 27, 2003. It’s a no-frills kind of place with limited hours, but the food is world-class Kansas City barbecue. They are most proud of their “burnt ends,” as well they should be, but the ribs, brisket, and side dishes are all pretty good, too. Linda is the side dish queen. Her potato casserole was selected as the Best Side Dish by theKansas City Starin 2003, and the restaurant recently started serving her broccoli casserole, which was the first-place vegetable at the American Royal in 2004. She was nice enough to share that one with me, and it’s on page 10 with a couple other American Royal winners. Smokin’ Guns has also kindly shared the coffee cake recipe here. Many a barbecue man has enjoyed this coffee cake on a Saturday morning.

Combine the dry ingredients. Cut in the butter with a pastry blender.

I’ve always heard great things about Jack stack but hadn’t been there until recently. Now I see why everyone likes it so much. It’s a little bit fancy for a barbecue joint, but it works. You’ll get a nice bakery bun and real plates and silverware here, in a cool old steakhouse kind of atmosphere. That’s the way they want it. The story goes that the Fiorella family, who started Jack Stack in 1957, decided they wanted to be more than a typical barbecue joint. So they added steaks, seafood, and upscale side dishes to the menu to set themselves apart from the rest. It worked. The Fiorellas now have three busy restaurants and a big catering business, and like many of the big barbecue houses, they now ship their food all over the world. The side dishes are a big attraction at Jack Stack. The beans are very famous, and they’re good, but I like the Cheesy Corn Bake and the Cheesy Potato Bake.

Just a little south of Kansas City in Overland Park is a great place called the Culinary Center of Kansas City My first reaction when I walked in the door was “Why isn’t there one of these in every town?” It’s a cool-looking place with kitchens kind of spread out through the rooms. There is one primary podium-type counter and they arrange the tables and chairs according to the event. They host many cooking classes, both using their in-house staff and also using local and visiting chefs. It’s a real fun place, and if I lived nearby I’d go there often. Laura O’Rourke is the owner and driving force and she does an incredible job. Laura practiced law for eighteen years before changing careers and opening the CCKC in 1998. She says she just needed to spread her wings and feed her entrepreneurial hunger, so she moved on. I love people like that. We should all be glad she did. There’s got to be a barbecue tie-in to this story, so here it is. Laura renewed her acquaintance with Chef Richard McPeake, whom she had actually worked with in a restaurant many years earlier. Richard was interested in doing some barbecue classes and Laura wanted to have some barbecue classes, so they got together on this idea. Richard is currently the vice president and culinary director for a very successful restaurant group in K.C. as well as a very good barbecue competitor with his team Rib Stars, so needless to say this worked very well with Richard’s first classes in Barbecue 101. Kansas City is a big barbecue town, so the interest continued to grow. Richard is now teaching eleven unique classes at the CCKC and does a total of about thirty a year. As a matter of fact, Richard and Laura have even teamed up to start the Midwest Barbecue Institute within CCKC. If you attend a certain number of Richard’s classes you get a personalized apron and are anointed a graduate. Very nice. I am proud to have been the first outside instructor to teach a class in this series. CCKC is a great place and I still wish there was one in every town. If you’re in the area and have a chance to attend a class at the Culinary Center of Kansas City, you’ll be glad you did.

This wonderful salmon recipe comes from Chef Richard McPeake. It’s from his bookThe Art of Smokology,available at www.ribstars.com.

This brine gives you an outstanding sweet smoked salmon.

Carefully measure out 2 quarts of hot water and place it into a plastic container. Add all the ingredients to the hot water and stir to completely dissolve. Cool to room temperature before using.