ON THE NIGHT the Kansas City Chiefs earned a second consecutive trip to the Super Bowl, a local chef named Mano Rafael cried in his kitchen. This qualifies as news in K.C.'s River Market neighborhood, where Rafael's bunker of a restaurant, Le Fou Frog, has been an anchor through blight and now revitalization. Mano, crying? Yelling, his longtime customers would have believed. The restaurant is often alive with sound: one of his daughters serenading diners with a song, or the chef himself launching into a curse-laden tirade in his native French. But tears? That doesn't sound like Mano at all. He's a tough guy, born in the hard port city of Marseille, a veteran of cutthroat New York kitchens and now, alongside his wife, Barbara, the master of ceremonies at his own perfect restaurant, where the combination of magic light and the best steak in Kansas City has made the place a fixture. Not as much of a fixture as Patrick Mahomes, but a fixture nonetheless.
Barb laughed the next day about his tears. Something about this Chiefs team speaks to Mano. He's always felt a bit like an outsider in Missouri, famous for turning his white-tablecloth culinary palace into a sports bar during French World Cup games -- for never letting the years across the ocean blunt his connection to home. Mano lives in Kansas City, but he is from Marseille, his restaurant practically a sovereign piece of French soil like an embassy or a warship or something. But this team -- the communal experience of last season's Super Bowl victory, when the city almost took flight with ecstasy, combined with the comfort the continued winning brought throughout this difficult year -- has captured his heart.
"I guess," Barb Rafael says, "he finally feels a part of his adopted city."
KANSAS CITY IS a big, modern city, with great restaurants, great neighborhoods and schools, and running through it all, a sense of civic pride more commonly seen in a much smaller place. Natives call it a town. But the usual flip side to civic pride is also part of Kansas City's self-identity: a nagging feeling of insecurity, that Denver is cooler, or Chicago is more metropolitan, a looking to the east and to the west with the idea that something might be better just over the horizon.
The city loves its sports teams like college fans. Irony is for folks who've never invested their whole selves in a head-hunting Derrick Thomas roaring off the edge (rest in peace, 58). Go to Arrowhead Stadium and walk through the parking lots. They smell like charcoal and wood. Go inside. Odd but true fact: It's the only stadium in America designed so that every sight line is mathematically perfect, no stretching or distorting the seating bowl in exchange for wider concourses or more concessions. The place is designed to watch football, not to have a cocktail party or eat hors d'oeuvres in a suite. The crowd is loud enough to be part of the game, a straight line of thunderous noise from Len Dawson to Dante Hall to Patrick Mahomes.
Chiefs fans believe they impact the game. That is a local article of faith. The roar in that stadium -- which, on the field in the moments before kickoff, is truly a living, almost frightening thing -- is the closest you can get to cracking a city open and looking inside its soul. It's hard to hear the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" and not feel like the weather is in the mid-50s and the air is full of barbecue smoke and everyone is wearing Zubaz and looking to kick some Raider ass. The Kansas City of the mind is as real as the brick and mortar of the actual place. After last season's Super Bowl win, five years after the Royals won the World Series, the city reacted like a small country winning an Olympic gold medal. When something great happens in Kansas City, it's palpable in every corner of the place.
That's what has made this season so strange.
Kansas City without a full Arrowhead, without a waiting list for tacos at Manny's, or for dumplings at Blue Koi, or for burnt ends at Bryant's, without fans packing Tanner's out in Overland Park or steak night at the Quaff on Broadway, well, it leaves Kansas City feeling like a whisper of a place, like maybe all those nagging insecurities might be true. Because it turns out the Chiefs don't need a packed stadium to win. They've kept right on rolling.
THERE'S AN ENDLESS debate about whether Kansas City is a baseball or a football town, which ignores the fact that it is both, fervent in its support of anything that spreads the gospel of the city outside its borders and devoted to those who bring its ethos to life. In this town, George Brett charging out of that dugout mattered as much as his chase to hit .400. And Le Fou Frog, world-class menu and service notwithstanding, is beloved because it looks and feels like a neighborhood joint.
When Chiefs head coach Andy Reid recently gave an interview in which he said his favorite hamburger in Kansas City came from a diner called Town Topic, residents and expat natives alike smiled. He got the answer right -- they are the best burgers in town! There's something of a shibboleth in Reid's answer, because it shows that he loves the town as it loves itself, that he isn't just a hired gun but a man who appreciates Kansas City for what it is. People love him for that knowledge and appreciation. Reid makes locals feel seen.
"We got a lot of mileage out of that," says Town Topic owner Scot Sparks. "That was awesome of him to do that. I couldn't believe he threw our name out there. We are incredibly grateful.
"I'm not the kind of guy to reach out to him. I kinda like to fly under the radar. I'm not a promoter. In fact, I almost didn't call you back. I just like to be who we are. I thought it was pretty sweet of him to throw that out there for this little hamburger joint."
Sparks is the grandson of the man who founded the place in 1937. He says Reid usually visits in the afternoon when the place is slow.
"He's been coming in for quite a while," he says. "He likes his cheeseburgers, man."
Back in March, the day the mayor of Kansas City announced the COVID-19 restrictions, Sparks went down to the restaurant. It was 10:30 at night, and the place was packed. He told everyone this was the last order and in about a half-hour got the place empty. Then he and his team sat down and tried to figure out how they'd survive. Turns out, decades earlier, his grandfather had put in a side window, about 8 inches wide and 3 feet tall, over by the pinball machine. They served out of there for a few days, and then he got the glass company to put in a sliding walk-up window too.
The city responded. Sparks thinks it's because people want something familiar and comforting, but whatever the reason, Town Topic did more business in 2020 than it did in 2019. That's Kansas City.
"We are just blessed," he says. "I don't normally talk like that."
THE ARCHITECTURE OF Kansas City also helps the city reveal itself. Arrowhead, for instance, looks swaggering and fierce. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is as grand as any museum in the world, but the huge, whimsical shuttlecocks on the lawn let you know this serious place doesn't take itself too seriously. If you look out that way from downtown, maybe from one of the loft apartment windows that face the old freight yard and Union Station, you'll see the National World War I Museum & Memorial. It's the perfect Kansas City monument: strong and durable, but without the pop culture dynamism of the D-Day museum in New Orleans or the unstilled and unforgiving pathos of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
It's also perfect because Kansas City, historians say, began in earnest when that terrible war ended. The local K.C. magazine defines the 1920s as "the birth of Kansas City," and it's right. It might have been founded in 1838, but it didn't take off until federal Prohibition hit, which, as the magazine writes, allowed corrupt political boss Tom Pendergast to turn the town into a Wild West, anything-goes "Paris of the Plains." Nothing was prohibited in Pendergast's city, including a lot of things that should have been.
The national ban on alcohol began on Jan. 17, 1920, and a month later the Negro Baseball League was formed in Kansas City. The Monarchs were created by joining a barnstorming team with an all-Black military baseball team, the 25th Infantry Wreckers. From the beginning, the city fell in love with the team, which won the first Negro Leagues World Series four years later. White and Black fans went to watch the team, even though The Kansas City Star didn't write a word about its debut. The Monarchs featured Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell and a star shortstop named Jackie Robinson. They were great for a long time.
During the Monarchs' first season, saxophonist Charlie Parker was born, and by high school, he lived just blocks from the team's stadium. Those blocks in between held the most rocking jazz clubs in the world and a growing culture of barbecue joints to feed people being entertained by both.
The Local 627 musicians' union started hosting late-night jam sessions in 1930 -- and those are still going down, an underground window into an otherwise vanished past. Arthur Bryant came to Kansas City in 1931, housing his barbecue place four blocks north of the stadium. In 1935, Parker played his first professional gig in town, on the same block that houses the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Town Topic opened in 1937.
In 1946 -- a year after the Monarchs signed Robinson -- George Gates opened his barbecue joint at 19th and Vine, the corner where Parker first met Dizzy Gillespie, on the same block as the musicians' union hall where those two greats first played together. Six decades later, Parker's union card would sell at a Christie's auction for $4,774. The American Jazz Museum bought one of Parker's two surviving saxophones at the same auction, and it's now on display -- next door to the Negro Leagues Museum. In the end, you cannot separate barbecue, jazz and sports from the story of how Kansas City found its identity. There is no understanding of the place without understanding that food, music and fandom are the way Kansas City tells its story -- to the world, yes, but most importantly to itself.
When the Monarchs lost Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, that spelled the end of the Negro Leagues but did not dull the city's obsession with sports. The A's arrived in 1954, and the Chiefs arrived in 1963.
"They made a major league town out of Kansas City," says local barbecue legend Ollie Gates.
Kansas City has always put a lot of stock in being "major league" -- and despite a nagging insecurity that its best days might be in the past, or that some bright future slipped through civic fingers, Kansas City retains some of the big bang energy injected as World War I ended. Even through the ups and downs of the past century, the city hasn't lost touch with its most essential self. Arthur Bryant's still sells burnt ends four blocks from the corner where the Monarchs used to play, and there is still live jazz playing in the room where Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie first jammed.
The energy endures, and it's easiest to find at the football stadium.
BUT OF COURSE there has been no furious noise, and no packed bars or streets or tailgates. The strange COVID fugue, combined with the way a second title run can never replicate the joy of a first, has made these playoffs feel strangely muted. But there's another way to look at it. Maybe the complacency you hear some fans complain about is just what it feels like to watch, in real time, a city gain confidence. Civic identity and pride of place always live on shifting sands, but something as seemingly insignificant as a sports team can and often does have a profound ability to make those sands feel like sturdy rock. Right now, Kansas City feels like a city on the rise, and while that is not only about the Chiefs, the success of the team is a reflection and an amplification of that feeling. That was true in 1924 when the Monarchs' title paralleled the city's rise, and it's true now as the Chiefs parallel the city's renaissance.
A temporarily diminished Arrowhead didn't mean that people aren't leaning in. They're just doing it at home. Ollie Gates, for instance, said takeout business on Sundays has exploded.
"The Chiefs and barbecue go hand in hand," he says.
There's something beautiful about Kansas City being known for barbecue, because the only reason that barbecue exists is because of the Monarchs and the city's love of jazz. All three are born of the same forces. The old ballfield is an empty lot and the center of the music world long ago moved to fancier ZIP codes, but that pit smoke remains as a monument, made of smell, taste and memory instead of the World War I memorial's marble, stone and steel, but no less durable or affecting. Gates says people are polite and patient while they wait. When asked how they manage the sudden and dramatic rush, he laughs. "We've been doing this for 75 years," he says with a chuckle. "You start early and stay late."
Start early and stay late. That's Kansas City, whether it's applied to work ethic or an Arrowhead crowd or a jazz band. This is a place that has been home to treasures like Buck O'Neil, like Charlie Parker and Jackie Robinson and Arthur Bryant, home to the Quaff and Dave's Stagecoach Inn, and Garozzo's and Waldo Pizza and LC's, and Le Fou Frog, where a Frenchman set up an outpost of his abandoned but never forgotten home, only to find a new home -- through his neighbors and customers, through his family and, as silly as it sounds, a football team. Back-to-back Super Bowls? That's Kansas City too, right now. The team works so hard, Mano Rafael says, and Mahomes seems like a nice kid, and the players care for each other and feel pride in giving their city reflected pride. In other words, he sees the team as a reflection of the best of his adopted city. The deep connections between a team and its city have these Chiefs breathing the same thin cultural air as the 1970s Steelers, or the post-Katrina New Orleans Saints, or perhaps most accurately, the Kansas City Monarchs. They live in the city and the city lives in them.