Kansas City

Back in September, Alex and I flew over to Kansas City for a long weekend, following our San Francisco Giants over to Kauffman Stadium and checking off another MLB Ballpark from Alex’s list. We also visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and of course we ate some barbecue. Perhaps more unexpectedly we also saw a very famous Japanese artwork at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and also got to eat some great Taiwanese American food too. See it all below!

Straight from the airport, we went to Q39 for Kansas City style bbq. They’re known for barbecue sauce and burnt ends– the savory ends of extra toasty and fatty brisket nuggets.

We also went straight to the Royals game to check off the Kansas City stadium, number 27 of 30 for Alex’s MLB ballparks list. The baseball stadium shares a parking lot with the football stadium as well. Home of the overachieving, extremely popular Chiefs. Bane of the SF 49ers’ existence, sadly. But we definitely saw locals rocking their Chiefs gear everywhere we went. And of course they’re back in the Superbowl again this weekend. 

Less popular, but they still did pretty well this year — the Kansas City Royals.

Pretty middle of the road in terms of the stadiums we’ve visited. Not the nicest, not the worst.

We went on Los Royals night and got these very nice embroidered jerseys! All around the outfield of the stadiums there are fountains that are programmed to do different shows, Bellagio-style. It’s a tribute to Kansas City as the city of fountains, which is pretty lovely.

There is also a little museum that you can visit. Lots of Royals history and bobbleheads– and we found (SF Giant) Tim Lincecum’s jersey too. 

Another fun touch (hard to see at night) is their scoreboard, in the shape of a crown. Look closely at the top of the video board. It has peaks! Maybe not the most practical aspect ratio for a jumbotron, but another nice nod to the Royals.

The brisket nachos were a dud. San Diego’s rendition of tri tip nachos was far better.  But look, a giant moon! Perfectly fitting, hovering over that Blue Moon ad.

And a great lead-up to the fireworks show! We’ve seen a surprising number of fireworks shows at baseball stadiums now. This one was pretty fun, and it didn’t hurt that the Giants (despite already being out of contention) won against the Royals, and actually ended up sweeping them 3-0 in the whole series, nearly spoiling the Royals’ playoff ambitions. They still made it in the end but went home quickly.

The next morning, we got brunch at the 21C Museum Hotel and walked around their free galleries afterwards.

Then we took the streetcar over to City Market and browsed the farmers markets. We stayed in a very central downtown location with easy streetcar access, but downtown was pretty deserted and of course no one walks anywhere in KC. It was not the greatest feeling, but we contributed two sets of legs to the foot traffic.

Then we visited the very cool letterpress shop, Hammerpress.

Ah yes, those Chiefs are everywhere. Including at this former bank turned public library next to where we stayed.

Bookstore + bar + cafe break! Afterword Tavern and Shelves. I sat and watercolored our baseball game from last night. 

A really great dinner at Novel.

Then we walked over to the architectural gem, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, to watch an actual performance…

… of Jurassic Park, with the soundtrack played by the KC Symphony!

It started pouring rain while we were inside, but that made for interesting views from the atrium.

We started the next morning with breakfast at Messenger Coffee Co.

Then we went over to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which honors the 1920s-40s segregated baseball leagues.

I wore my San Francisco Sea Lions jersey and cap (a very short-lived Negro Leagues team in 1946). Alex wore his Birmingham Black Barons cap and NY Giants Willie Mays jersey– tributes to Willie Mays’ Negro Leagues and first MLB teams, respectively. We both managed to find our teams represented in the exhibits too. 

Lots of mentions of Willie Mays, one of the all-time greats of baseball who just recently passed away in June 2024, just a couple days before his tribute game at Rickwood.

Lots of beautiful old jerseys, which I always love looking at. The Kansas City Monarchs were the cornerstone franchise of the Negro Leagues and won a whole lot of championships. They were also the first pro baseball team to use stadium lighting, enabling night games. 

I also found Toni Stone! She was famously the first female professional baseball player in otherwise all-male leagues, first on the Indianapolis Clowns and then on the San Francisco Sea Lions for the one year they were a Negro Leagues team. We now have a new street in Mission Bay, across from the ballpark, named after Toni Stone!

Afterwards, we had lunch at Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque.

Then we visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum, famous for all of these Claes Oldenburg badminton birdie sculptures outside.

The outline of the Missouri River.

On special exhibit was a whole gallery about Hokusai, the famous Japanese ‘wave’ woodblock print that made its way around the world and is still replicated all the time these days.

There were many other prints by Hokusai and his apprentices, with different and overlapping subjects. But none quite took on the cultural relevance of the famous wave print.

So wild that these were all woodblock prints! There were videos and displays showing the process of creating them. And lots of sketchbooks showing plans and ideas by the artists.

At the very end of the extensive gallery, the famed print itself.

Walking around Country Club Plaza, we spotted a Taiwan flag and found out that Tainan is one of Kansas City’s sister cities. Fun!

Finally, for our last dinner in KC, we connected with Taiwanese American chef Katie Liu (thank you Ho Chie for the intro). They were hosting a pop-up featuring drinks from Moon Bar that night.

With Katie of Chewology and Saranya of Moon Bar!

Many tasty drinks and bites!

Cheers to the whole team!

And that was it for our long weekend in Kansas City! Only three MLB stadiums left to visit, but maybe we’ll drag it out another year or two.

Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She compulsively documents and blogs all of her daily adventures. Follow her on instagram and view more of her professional work at annawu.com.