How a barbecue joint in rural Kansas has kept the flame alive for nearly 50 years

Killing time during a slow shift about 10 years ago, one of the servers at Guy and Mae’s Tavern folded a dollar bill into a paper airplane and sent it flying. It never landed. The plane got lodged between a couple of ceiling panels and was left there, dangling.

Then somebody else came along and crammed a few more dollar bills into the ceiling next to it. Eventually, customers started to follow suit, standing on barstools and taping bills to the walls of this rural Kansas barbecue joint.

“They would write their names on the dollars, and where they came from, or what they were doing that night, like a first date or celebrating an anniversary,” said Lori Thompson, the owner of Guy and Mae’s. “It became a little tradition.”

By early 2020, just about every available square inch of surface area in Guy and Mae’s was covered in dollar bills: the walls by the booths and the pool table, behind the beer taps, at the servers’ station. The hundreds of bills hanging from the ceiling would flutter like a wheat field when the wind blew in through the restaurant’s front door.

Then came COVID and a lot of uncertainty about the future of Thompson’s adored but isolated restaurant. Even before the pandemic, Thompson, a third-generation owner of Guy and Mae’s, was struggling to keep the operation afloat. Her husband and business partner, Ty, had died in 2016. Williamsburg — a speck of a town about 70 miles southwest of Kansas City, population 390 — kept shrinking, making it hard to find help. The previous winter had been a nasty one, full of ice storms that kept customers away. Insurance and property taxes were coming due. And now a global virus had caused hers and every other restaurant in the state of Kansas to shut down operations.

So, the decision was reluctantly made to crack open their unique piggy bank: all that cash on the walls. They’d tear it down like party decorations after a holiday.

“The tape was the hardest part,” Thompson said. “The bank has to be able to see the serial number on the bill, so you have to carefully tear the Scotch tape off without ripping the bill. It was quite an undertaking. It took us about a week to get everything down.”

Thompson took her pile of crusty cash to Bank Midwest in Ottawa, where they counted it up. Grand total: $4,500.

Between that and a Small Business Administration grant Thompson secured, it was enough to get Guy and Mae’s through those six weeks of mandated lockdown. Nearly three years later, the pits are still firing five days a week, and this middle-of-nowhere rib shack is about to embark upon its 50th year in business.

Born in a small town

You need a reason to go to Williamsburg, and back in 1973 there were more of them.

Though its railroad and coal mining roots were a thing of the past, Williamsburg persevered in the 20th century largely thanks to its location along U.S. Highway 50, a major cross-country thoroughfare. Small businesses dotted the two-block downtown, serving truckers, traveling salesmen and other motorists passing through eastern Kansas.

There was also a bar in town, and sometimes after his shift managing a service station in Ottawa, 15 miles up the road, Guy Kesner would stop in and have a couple. Then one day he came home and announced to his wife, Mae, that he’d quit his job in Ottawa and bought the beer joint in Williamsburg.

The family was surprised to learn that Guy intended to sell ribs at the bar.

“He never cooked anything at home — he never even made coffee,” recalled his daughter, Judy Simpson.

Mae was skeptical, too. “You’re not going to sell any ribs in Williamsburg,” she told Guy, recalling the conversation for a newspaper in the 1980s.

But Guy had grown up around barbecue pits in southern Missouri, and he was determined. He teamed up with a retired bricklayer friend to build a pit in the back of the bar.

Guy focused on the ribs and the rub, a secret recipe he called the “hookey-poo.” Mae, who’d worked for years at the Red Rooster diner across from Guy’s service station in Ottawa, created the tomato-based sauce.

At first they cooked only a couple slabs a day.

“Dad’s trucker friends that he knew from the service station would stop in and he’d say, ‘Here, try this,’” Simpson said. “And he kind of perfected the ribs over time that way.”

By 1975, Interstate 35 was up and running between Emporia and Ottawa, obliterating the Highway 50 trucker traffic on which Williamsburg commerce relied. But by then, word had begun to spread. Before long, newspaper and magazine articles were singing the praises of this Kansas beer joint cooking up hickory-smoked slabs in the back.

The place was as popular with pilgrimaging barbecue aficionados as it was University of Kansas students, who happily made the 45-mile drive from campus on the weekends to shoot pool, drink pitchers of 3.2 beer and scarf down ribs, which landed on the tables wrapped in foil and newspaper, with a couple slices of white bread on top — and no silverware.

“The only way to eat ribs is with your fingers,” Guy often said. “Ribs ain’t no good if they don’t drip off your chin and elbows.”

In the early 1980s, Guy and Mae’s was cooking 100,000 pounds of ribs and 2,000 gallons of sauce per year. It was not uncommon to encounter a two-hour wait, with hungry travelers loitering on the otherwise increasingly empty streets of downtown Williamsburg.

The smoke at the restaurant — from the pit and from the customers’ cigarettes, as well as the cigarettes he smoked himself — got to be too much for Guy in his later years, and by the time he died of emphysema in 1986, he’d taken to spending his days cutting brush and firewood on the family farm.

Two of his daughters — Simpson and Diana Macoubrie — ran the place for the better part of the next 25 years, at which point Thompson, who’s Simpson’s daughter, took over. (Mae died in 2014.) Retired now, Simpson and Macoubrie own a coffee shop and collectibles store next to Guy and Mae’s. It’s called Pass the Time, and it is the only other business currently operating in downtown Williamsburg.

Slow-cooked changes

A few things have changed at Guy and Mae’s over the past half-century. They sell barbecue sandwiches now: beef, polish sausage, ham and turkey (go with the beef). The booths are wood because the spurs and pliers that hung off farmers’ and ranchers’ clothes tended to rip up the old padded ones. They wrap their ribs in Iola Register newspapers instead of Ottawa Heralds. They use a point-of-sale computer system to manage orders and inventory. An internet jukebox has replaced the one stocked with CDs and, before that, 45s. Where there once was a George Strait poster there is now a Travis Kelce cardboard cutout.

But for the most part, Guy and Mae’s is a time capsule, as authentic a portal to the bygone era of rural beer joints as you’re likely to find in Kansas. It is bathed in warm bar light, all amber and brown, and decorated in vintage beer signs and posters that haven’t moved in decades. Political bumper stickers bearing the names of mostly forgotten Kansas politicians (Jill Docking, Jim Slattery) are slapped on the beer cooler. To-go orders hang on wooden clothespins in the kitchen.

The rib-cooking process also remains largely undisturbed by modern intrusions. Staff gets there around 8 in the morning to start prepping the ribs. They’re trimmed, then seasoned, then sent into the pit to be smoked for three or four hours while large pots of Mae’s sauce bubble on the stove top.

“We still use shagbark hickory, which Grandpa liked because it’s a little more mild than mesquite, and because there’s a lot of hickory trees around here and not as many fruit trees,” Thompson said. “We have some local people with hickory trees on their property who bring it by when they can get the wood cut for me, and I feed them dinner.”

The ribs — always served with sauce on the side, still never served with silverware — are of the “falling off the bone” variety, which makes them appealing to a certain type of customer but not to barbecue competition judges, who favor a “clean bite” between tender and tough.

“Judges will stop in here and tell us that their criteria is that you should be able to see your teeth marks on the meat, as opposed to the meat dropping off when you bite,” Thompson said. “So that makes our end product a little different than what you’d expect to find in a lot of places. Personally, I think it’s more of a comfort when the ribs are as tender as ours and they melt in your mouth and you don’t have to do all that work. And I also think our rub has better flavor. That’s why, I think, a lot of those judges still stop in here and take our ribs home to eat themselves.”

The restaurant isn’t starved of recognition. It was named one of the “8 Wonders of Kansas Cuisine” by the Kansas Sampler Foundation and was formally congratulated in a 2010 Kansas Senate resolution that cited Guy and Mae’s famous fans (racer Jeff Gordon, Royals legend George Brett, and Doc Severinsen, former bandleader of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”) and its “excellence in barbequing.”

But there have been many days, particularly in recent years, when Thompson has felt hunted by defeat. After working at Guy and Mae’s for a good chunk of her life, Thompson and husband Ty bought in as owners in 2008 when Macoubrie retired, then became the sole owners in 2015, when Simpson retired.

Less than a year later, Ty got sick. It was lymphoma, and he went fast. “He died on Flag Day,” Simpson said.

“I had to figure a lot of stuff out,” Thompson said. “I went from serving and helping out with some of the books to trying to run the whole place by myself with a house full of teenagers at home.”

The customer base in and around Williamsburg seemed to be withering away, too.

“Growing up, we knew who lived in every house and who they were related to,” Thompson said. “We’d ride our bikes around all day and stop by so-and-so’s for doughnuts and so-and-so’s for lemonade. But now I think I probably only know half the people in Williamsburg. The older people that we knew have passed and not very many of their kids have stuck around.”

The pandemic was a challenge not just because of the shutdown but also the supply-chain issues that followed it. One week the restaurant’s suppliers would be out of stock on ribs, the next week ingredients for the sauce, or the meat for their sandwiches.

“I’m proud of us for having weathered a lot of it, but there seems to be no stopping some of these rising costs,” Thompson said. “I hate to pass that on to customers, especially because we’re kind of a destination all the way out here. I feel that we have to keep prices really competitive because of that. And we’re not as busy as we were before COVID.” (A full slab of ribs is now $26.75; a half slab is $13.75.)

Thompson’s oldest son, Dalton, also died during the pandemic. He was just 25 and suffered from respiratory issues unrelated to COVID-19.

“We had some hard times when we were running the place,” Macoubrie said, “but nothing like what Lori’s gone through these past few years.”

The fourth generation of this family-owned restaurant has already begun to put some legs under the operation, though. Thompson’s other son, Wyatt, 23, now helps out around Guy and Mae’s when he’s not working as a welder, and her daughter, Caitlyn, has tentative plans to come back and work full time after she finishes up at Missouri Western State University. And Thompson’s longtime best friend, Tammy Harabin, returned to Williamsburg to work at Guy and Mae’s a few years back. “I snagged her right up,” Thompson said.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, as Harabin stood behind the bar explaining to a customer how to properly heat Guy and Mae’s cold ribs at home (“Leave them in the foil, put them on a cookie sheet, and keep them in the oven at 250 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour”), Thompson admitted that she didn’t much miss Guy and Mae’s cash-covered walls.

“It was a tradition, but it was really only the last 10 years or so,” Thompson said. “We started to become known for the dollar bills thing for a while. I’d rather people think of us as a place where the town comes together — a gathering spot for reunions, or where the kids stop in before prom to show us their dresses. Or, you know, as this small-town place where you can still get some really good ribs.”

Headed to Williamsburg?

Guy and Mae’s is located a mile off Interstate 35 at Exit 170, at 119 W. William St. in Williamsburg, Kansas — about 70 miles southwest of downtown Kansas City. Its hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and 11 a.m. to midnight on Friday and Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. For pickup orders, call 785-746-8830. Online at: facebook.com/guyandmaes.

This story was originally published December 7, 2022 at 5:30 AM.

David Hudnall

The Kansas City Star

816-234-4172

David Hudnall is a columnist for The Star’s Opinion section. He is a Kansas City native and a graduate of the University of Missouri. He was previously the editor of The Pitch and Phoenix New Times.