Valued Friends and Customers –

After recently celebrating our 25th anniversary, Kansas City Barbeque suffered a devastating fire on June 26, 2008.

Fortunately, no one was injured. In the next several days, we will be working with the insurance company, contractors, city agencies, etc., to try to get a handle on a time frame for reconstruction and re-opening.

We have been so blessed for so many years with the restaurant, we continue to look for the silver linings.

We are very appreciative of our staff, many of whom have been with us several years and are like family. They are anxious to get in and start cleaning up, and salvage and restore any of the memorabilia they can.

We’ve all had 25 years of good memories at Kansas City Barbeque, and we also had 25 years of accumulating priceless pictures, patches, hats and other mementos brought in by friends, teams and customers from around the world during that time. Most off those items were lost.

We have already had hundreds of people contact us expressing sympathy and support, and asking what they could do to help us get started on the next 25 years (including several generous offers to personally come out from people around the country). In the coming days we will post a wish list of replacement memorabilia that we could use to help get reopened.

Many people have also expressed an interest in helping the staff financially during this interim period. While we are working with the insurance company to maintain their basic compensation during this initial phase, we will also let people know what additionally they can do to be of assistance.

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.

Martin and Cindy Blair