9 Things Missourians Miss Most After They Move Away
Missouri ties with Tennessee for bordering more states than any other state in the country, eight apiece, and that geography makes leaving feel deceptively close.
It rarely feels that close once the moving truck pulls away.
These are the things Missourians miss most about their home state after they’ve packed up and moved.
1. Toasted Ravioli From The Hill
Missourians who grew up near St. Louis’s Hill neighborhood expect toasted ravioli on every appetizer menu in town.
A tavern cook on The Hill dropped an order of ravioli into a fryer by accident sometime in the 1940s, and the dish never left the menu.
Mama’s on the Hill and Charlie Gitto’s still argue over which restaurant served it first.
Order toasted ravioli almost anywhere outside St. Louis, though, and a server just looks confused.
Blank stare.
Bread and fry a batch at home instead, using jarred marinara because the tavern that invented the dish sits eight states away now.
2. Pizza Topped With Provel Cheese
Missouri’s own Provel cheese tops pizza across St. Louis, a processed blend of Swiss, cheddar, and provolone a Wisconsin dairy invented for a single grocery store back in the 1940s.
Imo’s Pizza, founded in the city in 1964, built its whole menu around it.
The chain cuts every pie into small squares instead of wedges, a St. Louis habit that goes back generations.
A transplant who orders pizza somewhere else gets mozzarella and wedge-shaped slices, no matter what they ask for.
Not the same pizza.
Grocery stores outside the St. Louis market simply don’t stock Provel, so recreating the pie means driving back or mail-ordering a block of it.
3. A Ted Drewes Concrete
For Missourians, nothing else measures up to a Ted Drewes concrete.
The family-run stand has served St. Louis since 1930.
Ted Drewes Sr. was a champion tennis player before he ever sold a scoop, an odd résumé for a frozen custard empire.
The shop started serving its signature concrete, a shake blended so thick a worker flips it upside down before handing it over, back in 1959.
It doesn’t spill.
The business still runs only two locations, both in St. Louis, one of them sitting on a stretch of old Route 66.
Moving away turns the treat from a drive across town into something that isn’t available anywhere else, mail order included.
4. Kansas City Burnt Ends
Missourians on the Kansas City side of the state grew up on burnt ends, the smoky, chopped edge of a brisket that Arthur Bryant’s turned into a signature order.
Pitmaster Henry Perry started the city’s barbecue tradition from an alley stand in 1908, and his cooks started saving the scraps other pitmasters threw away.
Scraps became the best part of the plate.
Kansas City kept them.
Other pitmasters everywhere else still slice a brisket the plain way, so burnt ends never earn their own line on a menu.
The next barbecue plate in a new city comes back sliced plain and level, no burnt ends in sight, no explanation offered.
Why St. Louis and Kansas City Rarely Cross Paths
Missouri stretches between two food-and-sports capitals that operate almost like separate states.
St. Louis and Kansas City sit about 250 miles apart, close to a four-hour drive across the state on I-70.
Columbia, home to the University of Missouri, sits almost exactly halfway between the two, roughly 125 miles from each.
It’s the only sizable city along that whole crossing.
5. Cardinals Nation on Game Day
Missourians’ devotion to Cardinals baseball turned Busch Stadium into one of the most reliable draws in the sport.
The Cardinals topped three million fans in attendance every season for 18 straight years, from Busch Stadium III’s opening in 2006 through 2023.
That streak, one of the longest in baseball, finally snapped in 2024.
A Pittsburgh Pirates manager first called them the best fans in baseball back in 1992, and the label stuck.
A new hometown team rarely earns that kind of loyalty this fast.
Many don’t try.
A transplant checks Busch Stadium’s box score out of habit long after moving away, from a city whose own team draws a fraction of that crowd.
6. Roar Inside Arrowhead Stadium
On the Kansas City side of Missouri, Arrowhead Stadium turned into the loudest building in American sports, on the record.
Chiefs fans set the Guinness World Record for loudest crowd roar at a sports stadium, hitting 142.2 decibels in 2014, a level that sits near the threshold of pain for human hearing.
They broke their own record to get there.
A brand new hometown stadium, wherever someone lands, rarely gets anywhere near that loud.
It never does.
Watch a game from a new couch in a new city, and it just doesn’t rattle the windows the way Arrowhead did.
7. A Weekend at Lake of the Ozarks
Missourians spend their summers at Lake of the Ozarks, a reservoir Union Electric built by damming the Osage River in 1931.
Bagnell Dam backed up more than 1,100 miles of shoreline, making it one of the largest man-made lakes in the country.
A short drive, once.
The lake sits within a few hours of much of the state, close enough for a weekend that costs a tank of gas and a cooler.
From anywhere outside Missouri, that same weekend takes vacation days instead of a Saturday.
8. A Paycheck That Stretches Further
Missouri’s cost of living runs well below the national average, and the gap becomes obvious the moment someone moves to a pricier state.
The state’s cost of living index sat at just 88.6 in the first quarter of 2026, tying Missouri with Iowa for the seventh-lowest cost of living in the country.
A hundred is the national average.
Rent runs cheaper, and so does a weekly grocery run.
A starter home costs less than many states charge for just a down payment.
Noticeable savings.
Enough people have noticed the difference. Missouri gained roughly 8,100 more residents from other states than it lost in 2024, and its single biggest net gain, 7,500 people, came from pricier Illinois.
That comparison works in both directions.
A transplant who left Missouri for a pricier city keeps running that same comparison, converting every grocery bill back into Missouri dollars out of habit.
Psst! How much do you know about Missouri beyond the things on this list? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Show-Me State IQ
Answer these questions on Missouri history, food, and firsts. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Which future entertainment mogul spent part of his boyhood in Marceline, Missouri, a town that later inspired Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland?
9. An Afternoon at City Museum
Across Missouri, families take visiting relatives to City Museum, a St. Louis attraction built entirely inside a scrapped shoe factory.
Artist Bob Cassilly bought the old International Shoe Company building in 1993 and spent years turning its guts into slides, tunnels, and caves built from salvaged pipe and stone.
A school bus now teeters off the edge of the roof, ten stories up, open to anyone willing to climb inside it.
No blueprint, no theme, nothing else quite like it.
One of a kind.
New friends outside Missouri hear about City Museum and assume the description is exaggerated, right up until they see the school bus hanging off the roof for themselves.
It has to be climbed to be believed.
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