[ad_1]
ON THE NIGHT the Kansas City Chiefs earned a second consecutive journey to the Tremendous Bowl, a neighborhood chef named Mano Rafael cried in his kitchen. This qualifies as information in Ok.C.’s River Market neighborhood, the place Rafael’s bunker of a restaurant, Le Fou Frog, has been an anchor by means of blight and now revitalization. Mano, crying? Yelling, his longtime clients would have believed. The restaurant is usually alive with sound: one in every of his daughters serenading diners with a music, or the chef himself launching right into a curse-laden tirade in his native French. However tears? That does not sound like Mano in any respect. He is a tricky man, born within the arduous port metropolis of Marseille, a veteran of cutthroat New York kitchens and now, alongside his spouse, Barbara, the grasp of ceremonies at his personal excellent restaurant, the place the mix of magic mild and one of the best steak in Kansas Metropolis has made the place a fixture. Not as a lot of a fixture as Patrick Mahomes, however a fixture nonetheless.
Barb laughed the following day about his tears. One thing about this Chiefs group speaks to Mano. He is at all times felt a bit like an outsider in Missouri, well-known for turning his white-tablecloth culinary palace right into a sports activities bar throughout French World Cup video games — for by no means letting the years throughout the ocean blunt his connection to residence. Mano lives in Kansas Metropolis, however he’s from Marseille, his restaurant virtually a sovereign piece of French soil like an embassy or a warship or one thing. However this group — the communal expertise of final season’s Tremendous Bowl victory, when town virtually took flight with ecstasy, mixed with the consolation the continued profitable introduced all through this tough yr — has captured his coronary heart.
“I assume,” Barb Rafael says, “he lastly feels part of his adopted metropolis.”
KANSAS CITY IS a giant, trendy metropolis, with nice eating places, nice neighborhoods and faculties, and working by means of all of it, a way of civic delight extra generally seen in a a lot smaller place. Natives name it a city. However the traditional flip facet to civic delight can be a part of Kansas Metropolis’s self-identity: a nagging feeling of insecurity, that Denver is cooler, or Chicago is extra metropolitan, a trying to the east and to the west with the concept one thing is likely to be higher simply over the horizon.
[ad_2]
Source link