The Arthur Bryant's website quotes Calvin Trillin saying "The single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant's Barbeque at 18th and Brooklyn in Kansas City." (I wonder if he would still make that assessment?) Trillan is a Kansas City-born writer who moved to the big city of New York as a writer for The Nation and The New Yorker without losing his Midwestern charm and his affinity for slow-smoked, smothered-in-sauce delicacies. Described as "the Walt Whitman of American eats," Trillin popularized food out of the mainstream of the food press, not pretentious restaurants serving Continental cuisine but places with history and character that served greasy but soul-satisfying food. It was Trillin who famously exclaimed, "Health food makes me sick."
After leaving Kansas City to join the army, Trillin got a job with Time magazine as a reporter in the South. He then moved to New York and joined the staff of The New Yorker, but he never stop considering himself a Kansas Citian. The first sentence of American Fried, the first installment of his so-called "Tummy Trilogy," acknowledges his bias right off the bat: “The best restaurants in the world are, of course, in Kansas City. Not all of them; only the top four or five. Anyone who has visited Kansas City and still doubts that statement has my sympathy: He never made it to the right places.”
At The New Yorker he wrote a magazine article every three weeks, taking the summers off for rest and travel. Although his writings spanned a spectrum of subjects, from murders to politics, he usually came back to eating, for he had experienced a lot of tastes and flavors while on assignment. He earned a reputation as a champion of regional cuisine in the United States, whether it was our smoky yet sweet barbeque here in Kansas City or boudin balls in New Orleans or chicken wings from Buffalo.
When asked why he wrote "Winsteads. Now that's how a hamburger should be," he responded:
A lot of that was nostalgia. I think one of the things that started me writing about eating was the realization that when people from Kansas City, which happened to be my hometown, got together, what they talked about was Winstead’s hamburgers or Bryant’s barbecue or something. They didn’t talk about some imitation French restaurant. The sort of eating I’ve always been interested in is what I guess you’d call vernacular eating. It has something to do with a place. Buffalo chicken wings have something to do with Buffalo. The fact that people in Cincinnati have something they call authentic Cincinnati chili, and seem unaware that people in the Southwest eat chili, let alone Mexicans, and think that chili is made by Macedonians and served on spaghetti, that’s interesting to me. Whether Skyline chili is better than Empress chili I don’t really care about.
Trillin still writes his "Deadline Poet" column for The Nation about current political topics in rhymed couplets, but you would be better served seeking out archived articles on The New Yorker's website about his many travels to out-of-the-way places across this strange country or one of his 24 books, especially the aforementioned Tummy Trilogy.
He grew up "both a Midwesterner and a Jewish man. That peculiar heritage has given him his dry, sneaky wit, one particularly adept at puncturing the grandiose pretentions of self-important people (dubbed 'big k'nockers' by his father)." In the same interview Trillin commented on his Midwestern, jewish heritage: "It's true that when you talk about being from Kansas City -- and I've been reluctant to give up being from Kansas City -- people assume that you're a Methodist. But you're not necessarily a Methodist." Calvin Trillin was not a Methodist, but he was a damn good Kansas City writer who knew how to eat.
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