A Steak Through The Heart

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I have never stopped bragging about my old Missouri hometown, but there have always been boosters in Kansas City who thought I bragged about the wrong things--barbecue and the cow on the top of the American Hereford Association headquarters, for instance, instead of Continental restaurants and similarly sophisticated cultural attractions. I liked the motto Kansas City had when I was a boy: "The Heart of America." The boosters liked the motto "More Boulevards Than Paris, More Fountains Than Rome."

In the 1970s some of the boosters hired a New York City public relations firm to persuade people that Kansas City was not a cow town. They said I should quit harping on that American Hereford Association cow and that, contrary to what I kept claiming, its heart and liver do not light up at night.

Eventually they abandoned the campaign, but I suspect that they continued to avert their eyes when they passed the American Hereford Association building. Nobody thought the campaign had done any lasting damage; it's not easy, after all, to hurt the feelings of a cow. Then last week I read in the Wall Street Journal that the boneless sirloin known for decades as the Kansas City strip, a cut of meat invented in the Heart of America, is now on most steak-house menus as the New York strip--although in Kansas City outraged customers forced Ruth's Chris Steak House to correct the misnomer. In other words, once Kansas City had become accustomed to avoiding the subject of beef, New York snatched our steak.

Ironically, the news came just as I thought I'd reached a detente with the boosters on the subject of meat. Several years ago, I suggested dismantling one of the fountains and using the material to erect a monument to Henry Perry, who brought barbecue to Kansas City. Since I had just suggested that the airport, which they called Kansas City International, be named after Arthur Bryant, perhaps the most distinguished of Perry's spiritual descendants, and that a major Missouri River bridge be named for Chicken Betty Lucas, the legendary pan-fryer, some people thought my suggestion about the fountain was the last straw.

But last winter I went to the Chamber of Commerce banquet and explained that I had been misunderstood. It all depended on how many fountains there were, I said. I didn't want to dismantle a fountain if we had only one more fountain than Rome. I didn't want to lose the edge. I didn't want to arrive in Rome some day and find a sign saying, "Piu fontane di Kansas City."

Then came the bombshell from the Journal. One quote was particularly galling: a spokesman for the parent company of one steak-house chain--a company based in Wichita--said that his company's restaurants call a Kansas City strip a New York strip because "it's a more cosmopolitan name." Condescended to by someone from Wichita! That's what comes from turning against your own cattle. As we used to say in Kansas City--this was before they asked us to cut down on agricultural images--sooner or later the chickens all come home to roost.