5 Missouri Barbecue Arguments That Never End
St. Louis and Kansas City rarely agree on barbecue.
Don’t expect either area to settle which Missouri city does barbecue right.
These are the Missouri barbecue arguments that never end.
1. Sweet Sauce or Tangy?
Kansas City’s classic barbecue sauce is thick, sweet, and dark with molasses, the kind that clings to a rib and coats a spoon.
St. Louis takes the opposite approach.
Its sauce leans on ketchup and cider vinegar for a thinner, tangier finish instead of piling on more sweetness.
The Maull family says its St. Louis recipe was among the country’s earliest commercial barbecue sauces, first bottled in 1926.
Locals have made a habit of buying it ever since.
St. Louis Magazine reported in 2015 that a Sweet Baby Ray’s representative said St. Louis buys nearly twice as much barbecue sauce per person as the average American, more than Memphis or Kansas City.
Neither side is backing down.
Kansas City drowns a rib in sauce.
St. Louis wants you to taste the vinegar first.
Which sauce is obviously right comes down to which city taught you to eat ribs in the first place.
Bottles of both styles sit on the same grocery store shelf in either city.
Shoppers on each side reach for the sauce they grew up on without a second thought.
Missouri’s “St. Louis-Style Ribs” Term, Explained
This barbecue term on menus nationwide has nothing to do with St. Louis’s sauce or its sweetness debate.
It’s a butcher’s cut: A spare rib rack trimmed into a neat rectangle, with the sternum, cartilage, and rib tips removed.
A cook in Seattle or Maine can serve “St. Louis-style ribs” and never touch a drop of Missouri sauce.
2. Authenticity and Credit
Kansas City’s barbecue reputation was built by generations of Black pitmasters, and heavy sauce has always been part of what they served.
Some newer voices in food media argue authentic barbecue skips sauce, relying only on smoke and a dry rub.
Barbecue historian Adrian Miller, speaking to Kansas City’s NPR member station KCUR, says that definition erases a defining piece of Black barbecue tradition.
Miller argues the same shift has pushed aside the Black pitmasters and restaurant owners who built Kansas City barbecue as the food went mainstream.
Whose barbecue counts, in other words, comes down to who tells the history.
Credit still isn’t settled.
3. Gates or Bryant’s?
Two Kansas City barbecue families, Gates Bar-B-Q and Arthur Bryant’s, both trace their start to 1946, in the same historic barbecue neighborhood.
Both also trace back further, to pitmaster Henry Perry’s barbecue stand from the early 1900s, the operation historians credit as the root of Kansas City barbecue.
The similarities end there.
Arthur Bryant’s kept things simple.
Arthur took over the business from his brother Charlie in 1946, when Charlie sold it to him.
Twelve years later, Arthur moved the restaurant to the Brooklyn Avenue address it still serves from today.
Gates went the other way, opening multiple locations, polishing the dining rooms, and building a training program for new counter staff.
Barbecue historian Adrian Miller, speaking to Kansas City’s NPR station KCUR, names the Gates-versus-Bryant’s question as Kansas City’s defining barbecue rivalry.
Both men were inducted into the Hall of Fame together in September 2021.
Barbecue fans still haven’t settled it.
Order at Gates or Bryant’s, and you’ll hear a case for the other before you’ve paid.
Psst! How much do you know about Missouri barbecue history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Missouri Barbecue IQ
Answer these questions on Missouri barbecue history. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Kansas City’s famous KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce was invented in the 1970s by someone with what day job?
4. Progress or Sellout?
Kansas City's barbecue scene now sells burnt ends as a headline menu item, sometimes for more per pound than the brisket they came from.
Old-timers call that a sellout.
Regulars who never got the free scraps call it progress.
The dish started as free trimmings sliced off a smoked brisket's point, tossed to whoever asked for them at the counter.
Writer Calvin Trillin made the dish famous in a 1972 magazine essay about Arthur Bryant's, describing the charred edges as something worth dreaming about.
Nobody paid for them then.
Many Kansas City joints smoke burnt ends on purpose today, cube them, and sell them as a specialty.
Visitors now plan whole trips around getting a taste, no scraps required.
5. Worth the Snoot?
Missouri's other barbecue specialty, the snoot, is a smoked and sauced pig snout that C&K Barbecue has served since the 1960s in St. Louis.
The restaurant, now run from a spot on Jennings Station Road, dresses each snoot in thick red sauce and smokes it until it's crisp enough to crack.
Food writers have praised it as a rare discovery.
Not everyone agrees.
Even the current owner's daughter, Jamila Brantley, has said she wouldn't try a snoot growing up, and now treats potato salad as the safer bet.
Other St. Louis joints serve versions too, but C&K's snoot sandwich comes piled on white bread with extra sauce.
A snoot comes from the snout itself, trimmed of its cartilage and fried until the edges turn as crisp as bacon.
Order a snoot in St. Louis today, and the person next to you at the counter might be trying their first, too.
8 Ways Out-of-Staters Break Buc-ee's Etiquette Before They Reach the Brisket
Fresh brisket hits the counter at a Buc-ee's, and half the store turns at once.
Regulars know the drill without thinking, but out-of-staters give themselves away before they even reach the line.
8 Ways Out-of-Staters Break Buc-ee's Etiquette Before They Reach the Brisket
