barbecue, brisket, woodyard, woodyard bar-b-que, woodyard barbecue

Woodyard Bar-B-Que in Kansas City, KS

October 13, 2017 by Joe Mathieu

Woodyard Bar-B-Que brisket sandwich.

Today I visited Woodyard Bar-B-Que in Kansas City, Kansas. Woodyard is located off I-635 and Merriam Drive. According to their website, they have been at their Merriam location since the late 1950’s. Woodyard Bar-B-Que started with Frank Schloegel II working his grill at lunch, feeding his customers and his friends for free, while he sold wood deliveries over the phone. Frank Schloegel III kept it going in the same spirit of generosity and started smoking for charities and church fundraisers. Eventually he gave in to multiple requests and opened the restaurant. They’ve been a staple of the community ever since.

I arrived around 5:10 on Thursday evening. This is a restaurant where you order at the counter and they bring your food out to your table. They also have a self-serve drink station inside. There are only a couple of tables in the main building where you order, but there are two additional buildings connected to it that may have had additional indoor seating but they were closed today. Most of the seating is outside.

I ordered their brisket sandwich and fries and got my drink and sat at one of the tables. My bill was $11.90. There were only two other people in the restaurant when I arrived, so it was a good time to go. Within a couple minutes they brought my sandwich to me.

The sandwich was served without sauce. The brisket was thinly sliced and was warm but a bit tough and bland. It was juicy enough to make the bun soggy, but didn’t have much of a taste to it. It actually tasted like a brisket you would make in a crock pot. I would doubt that’s how they prepare it, but that’s what it tasted like. I finished the sandwich without putting any sauce on it, but pulled a couple slices of beef off so I could try their sauces.

They have an original sauce and another sauce that they call their “hot” sauce. The original sauce is sweet with a molasses taste to it. It’s a good sauce overall. The hot sauce only had a little bit of kick to it. I wouldn’t classify it as “hot” personally, but it did have more of a kick to it than their original sauce.

The fries they served were shoestring cut. They were flavorful with a little bit of seasoning on them. I ate them with the hot barbecue sauce. I noticed on their menu that they highlight their smoked hot wings. You can order as little as one of them and they advertise them as jumbo wings, so I ordered one. The wing was chewy, as was the skin. The meat did have a smoky flavor to it, but I wouldn’t classify it as a spicy or hot buffalo-style wing.

Woodyard’s smoked hot wing.

Woodyard’s has been featured on quite a few food television shows. They were featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” on July 12th 2012, Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” April 16th of 2012, Andrew Zimmern’s “Delicious Destinations” on November 24th 2015 and “Nigella Lawson’s Christmas Special” on December 11th, 2015.