Friday Food Porn: Kansas City BBQ, a Long Way From Home

Photo courtesy Peter Mumford

Issaquah, WA is a long way from Kansas City. But the route that Stan Phillips has taken to get here from there has been even more circuitous than the simple distance between two points on the map. He spent his childhood learning how to be a pit man by watching his father work a massive backyard smoker built for the bargain price of a million bottles of Jack Daniel's. He spent time in Texas learning about brisket, in the Carolinas eating pork. It took him a long time to get to Washington State, but when he did, he knew that the way to happiness was through barbecue. He opened Stan's Bar-B-Q and never looked back.

Photo courtesy Peter Mumford

This week's review is all about Stan, all about Stan's restaurant and all about the many joys of smoked meat. I ate my way deliriously through the menu in preparation for the review and then, as always, photographer Peter Mumford followed along a couple days later to shoot the scene, the food and the people that make up a regular summer night at Stan's Bar-B-Q.

The results are up right now in the slideshow section. So if you can't drop what you're doing and get right over to Stan's this minute, why not take a moment to flip through the snaps and see what you're missing? Obviously, it's not going to be as good as being there (mostly because we haven't yet developed a way to make pictures smell like barbecue over the internet), but I guess that if sometimes pictures can be the next best thing to being there, then a few snaps of Stan's Kansas City style ribs, brisket sandwiches, cold beer and chili are going to have to hold you until you can go and sink your face into the real thing.