Over the past few decades, culinary expectations and offerings in America’s midsized cities, particularly in the Midwest, have utterly transformed. The popularity and visibility of celebrity chef culture and global cuisine, popularized by food and travel television and competition cooking, and driven by the demands of a more well-traveled base of potential restaurant patrons and the supply of a larger pool of talented chefs who don’t necessarily want to live in New York, has made global, inventive, exceptional food available in cities like Kansas City to a degree that was completely foreign in the mid-90s, when ten-year-old me was eating chicken fingers at Applebee’s. Emblematic of this transformation is a new-ish (they bravely opened during the pandemic!) near-eastern (think Turkish and Lebanese, for example) restaurant experience — Clay & Fire, where you absolutely, unequivocally need to be eating.
Housed in a converted residential home nestled in Kansas City’s Westside neighborhood, Clay & Fire epitomizes everything I wanted to find when I moved back to Kansas City three years ago after a childhood spent here. Without restaurants like this, a move from an east coast city would have been difficult. It’s been a while since I left a restaurant and honestly couldn’t identify an execution error, a single aspect of the experience I wished would be different. So take a swing! Eat here!
Here is what I ate. Apologies for having literally zero pictures of a completed dish – every picture below is of the remnants (ranging from largely intact to completely eviscerated) of a Clay & Fire offering. I will do better.
- Hummus and eggplant spreads (trio). There are two hummuses and one eggplant spread. The traditional hummus is spiced with sumac and the eggplant went quickly; but the star of the show is the guajillo hummus. As someone who once requested a five-course Iron Chef-style guajillo-centered tasting menu for a birthday, this was a pleasant surprise. It was the star of the show, both visually and on the palate. Served with a bendy flatbread from the wood-fired oven. (Did I mention the wood-fired oven?) Everyone orders the trio and so should you.
- Pickled cabbage. Not fermented, but took me to a very kimchi kind of place.
- Turnips, greens, and warm strawberry salad. See the photo at the top. This was my favorite dish. Pretty sure everything was roasted in the wood-fired oven. Would eat eight of these.
- Kharcho. This is an ode to Kansas City – a smoked short rib with polenta and coriander tomato sauce. Forgot to take a picture! Sorry! This is a play on a familiar flavor profile, and I really appreciate KC restaurants busting out the smoker to incorporate local flavor into even the most eclectic dishes. Fox & Pearl (smoked carrots; smoked pork meatball in a pasta dish) also gets the gold star in this regard.
- Carrots. Roasted in the wood-fire. The chimichurri thing is spicy, probably the spiciest item I ate. But still restrained. These were addictive.
- Chicken kabob plate. Well-executed and a great kids order if their adventurous palates are still developing. The homemade pickles have some damn warming spices – good lord these were good.
- Pizza. They have it! Our kids ordered the Grandma’s Pizza, a play on a margarita. It was an astonishingly good piece of pizza. Evoked Neapolitan sensibilities in the wood-fired oven. They serve far cooler pizzas as well.
- Beef kabob. Heat from the marinade hits you like a ton of bricks, flavor lingers. Order!
- Halloumi. I mean, grilled cheese. Pretty sure this is a molasses glaze? Or something similar. For god’s sake order!
- Desserts. There were two when we ordered: A burnt Basque cheesecake (cooked, where else, in the wood-fired oven) and a strawberry pound cake kind of dish. Both ridiculous, both provoked heated disputes between family members re: portion allocation. I enjoyed this with a cup of Lebanese coffee (cardamom-forward).
Clay & Fire! Hit them up! We’ll go back for brunch, the menu is totally different. Happy eating!
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