SIMPLYkc Magazine March 2022

INFOCUS

RETHINKING FOOD

REDISCOVERING THE BEAUTY OF KC THROUGH FOOD WRITTEN BY JULIE BURTON / PHOTOS BY JAMI BOWMAN

K

ansas City is a city of change. Winters are bitter.

Summers are scorchers.

Spring and fall are a respective warm and cool relief. And sometimes, you’ll get all four seasons in one day. That’s the beauty of Kansas City—it’s never boring.

And Kansas City’s taste in food?

Unforked knows tastes shouldn’t be boring either. Variety is always a good thing in the restaurant business. Hearty soups and chilies in the winter. Fresh salads and burgers in the summer. And tacos? Come on, those are acceptable year-round.

Unforked’s menu changes with Kansas City seasons. The menu changes approximately six times a year rather than four times because of the earth below our feet. The soil that makes

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up Kansas City and the regions surrounding it determine what is good eating. Lucky for us, the city of change becomes the city of variety at Unforked.

“The difference is the quality of where we get our food. We go to great lengths to get what we use.”

Fresh, local, quality ingredients are what set Unforked apart from other fast-casual restaurants. That’s exactly what Jim Sheridan, founder of Unforked, had in mind when he opened a location in Overland Park in 2011.

He says, “Growing up here, I wanted

to incubate an idea about getting healthy, locally sourced foods, great ingredients, and use it to support local farmers. I wanted people to know exactly what is in the food. We don’t have a freezer here. We make everything from scratch.”

Of course, making everything from scratch doesn’t start when the doors open. It starts at 7:30 am when the kitchen fires up. The fries, a crowd favorite, are cut by hand and take 24 hours to make. The barking pig taco is braised in the oven for hours and hand-shredded. The nutrient-rich kale salad has been a crowd favorite even before the kale craze. And the KC Q taco uses Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que sauce.

Kansas City knows barbecue, and so does the New York Times. The New