Weekend Getaway: Kansas City

Welcome to the weekend!

In today’s newsletter, we’re off to Kansas City, where we recently spent a great week exploring. The city is located along the Kansas and Missouri border, so you’ll go back and forth between the two states, and over our visits, we have found a lot to love. There are friendly people, appealing neighborhoods, a free streetcar, great museums, and excellent food and drink. Kansas City is best known for barbecue, and we ate plenty of brisket and burnt ends while in town. But we also ate breakfast crunchwraps, pork tenderloin sandwiches, falafel, chicken heart skewers, Kansas City tacos, and much more. In today’s Weekend Getaway newsletter — which run the first week of every month — we’ll take you along with us and share all of our recommended restaurants, bars, and cafés. As always, you can get our Weekend Getaway recommendations in a handy downloadable guide — our Field Guide to Kansas City. It’s designed for your phone and features all our picks organized into a robust three-day itinerary with original photography, social media links, and our must-order dishes and drinks. All our guides are included in a paid subscription or available for sale on our website.

Also this week, be sure to peruse our Weekend Reading list, which features stories about American wine road trips, a Hamptons alternative, and a spotlight on a great Connecticut town.

Finally, a big congrats to American Weekender reader Isabelle, the winner of our recent giveaway with American Spoon! Isabelle, be on the lookout for a package of all of our favorite jams, preserves, honeys, and more from one of our favorite Michigan producers!

Thanks for reading!

— Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt
Editors, American Weekender

Paris of the Plains

KANSAS CITY — Nearly a decade ago, I made my first visit to Kansas City. I visited for Paris of the Plains, a fun (but now-defunct) cocktail festival named after one of the city’s nicknames, and spent a few days eating and drinking around town between events. I was traveling solo and had a blast — everywhere I went, people were unfailingly friendly, and I left feeling like the city’s food and drink scene had a great energy. For our most recent visit, we’d been hearing about a lot of new things in town and wanted to explore what was new while revisiting some classic spots. I left with the same feeling — the food scene feels exciting and the people of Kansas City are happy you’re there.

We always tap local experts for insights when we travel, and for Kansas City, we asked and about their go-to spots. The Kansas City-based pair are food writers, for both their own newsletters, Haterade and Midwesterner, as well as a variety of publications from the New York Times to Condé Nast Traveler. When we arrived in town, the four of us met up for dinner at The Town Company, which was just a few blocks from our home base at the Hotel Indigo. The Town Company’s chefs Johnny and Helen Jo Leach also have the great cafe Dear Donna, where we headed for breakfast later in the week. After a long day in the car, the TC Old Fashioned, with bourbon, demerara, and smoked bitters, was just what I wanted. The other highlights were the “hot buns,” rolls brushed with butter and sprinkled with salt and served with butter and carrot dip, and the pork chop, which was rubbed with chiles and smoked over the hearth.

The next morning, we visited Café Corazon, a vibrant Latin- and Indigenous-owned café with three locations. We ordered their iced horchata latte with espresso, vanilla, cinnamon, and rice and whole milk along with the Cortadito — a cortado with the addition of single-origin Peruvian cacao. Our drinks paired well with the breakfast empanada with bacon, egg, and cheese; the rajas tamale; and — our favorite — the chorizo burrito filled with eggs, potato, and jack cheese.

When lunch rolled around, we were eager to get started on our barbecue research. Kansas City barbecue includes a lot of beef, like ribs, brisket, and burnt ends (these are cut off the point end of the brisket), but you’ll also find pork, turkey, and other proteins. The barbecue sauce is thick and sweet (thanks to KC Masterpiece, it’s the sauce you probably envision when you hear “barbecue sauce”). But if we learned one thing about Kansas City barbecue from our visit, it’s that there is no one correct answer for where to go — every KC local has their own favorite spot.

We started with two of the heavyweights for lunch. Sandwiches are the kings of KC barbecue, so we headed to Gates Bar-B-Q for a Nooner, their signature sandwich. Available during lunch, it is made with your choice of sliced meat (we went with brisket but turkey and pork are also popular) topped with burnt ends. For a side, do not miss the superb barbecue beans. Next, we went to Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque for The B3, a burnt ends sandwich topped with a crisp onion ring. (This was my favorite barbecue item across the four spots we visited, but much like Kansas Citians, Kenney and I were divided on this question. His favorite was the Z-Man from Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que, but we’ll get to that later.)

When cocktail hour arrived, we headed to The Campground, which had been on our to-visit list since even before it opened. We had been following Christopher Ciesiel and Cristin Llewellyn’s backyard home bar account on Instagram, and in 2018, they turned it into a woodsy cocktail bar anyone can visit. Tap into the vibe with the Negroni, which is stirred with housemade pine needle aperitivo, and the Old Fashioned, which enhances a whiskey blend with apple brandy, amaro, and Benedictine.

With time for another round of drinks before dinner, we went to XO Hifi, a tiny, dark Japanese listening bar with a low-key vibe and a playlist that ranges from Willie Nelson to João Gilberto. The Tago Mago, a highball that amps up the tropical fruit and spice with tequila, passionfruit, pineapple, and cinnamon, was one of the best drinks I’ve had recently.

You should prioritize dinner at Anjin. Easily the hottest restaurant in town, it’s from Nick and Leslie Goellner, who also run Antler Room. Inspired by Japanese izakayas, Anjin features a counter that stretches around the kitchen and a tight, ever-evolving menu. We loved the skewers, which might be chicken hearts or mushrooms with cured egg yolk, the crispy shrimp and vegetable kakiage tempura, and yuzu sake and blackberry-mint swirl soft serve, which we got topped with Japanese Kit-Kats.

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