Esquire picks nation’s best new restaurants opening in pandemic. One is in Kansas City

Esquire magazine took a look at new restaurant openings across the country and picked 23 for its “Esquire’s best New Restaurants in America, 2020,” including one in Kansas City’s Westside.

Fox and Pearl, at 2143 Summit St., is No. 10 on the list.

“Fox and Pearl melds live-fire cooking, head-to-tail butchery, house-made charcuterie, superb hand-cut pastas, and natural wines in a handsome space that will make you rethink what Midwestern cuisine can be,” Esquire says.

Chef Vaughn Good and partner Kristine Hull opened the restaurant in July 2019, in a 112-year-old building that was originally the lodge hall for a Swedish fraternal organization.

“It’s so wild. We don’t know when they came in,” Hull said.

While the listing might not help boost business during the pandemic, especially after new restrictions were rolled out this week, Hull said it should help the restaurant’s profile in the long term.

Esquire said the pandemic made it especially challenging to come up with a “best” list but its food and drinks editor, Jeff Gordinier, and its culture and lifestyle director, Kevin Sintumuang, spent months searching out the “people and places that restored us.”

“If there’s a unifying theme, something that all of our picks have in common, it would be the stubborn survival of community in the face of what can only be called an existential threat,” said Gordinier in the article.

He visited restaurants from November to early March when the quarantines started. Then he rented a car and hit Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, North Carolina, among other places.

Sintumuang — along with his wife and two daughters — set out on a road trip from Brooklyn to the West Coast and all the way back. He hit Kansas City, as well as many other markets including Denver and San Francisco.

They wore masks, and they sat outside, sometimes in the rain at rickety tables.

They did the list this year as “an expression of support — love, really — for the chefs and bartenders and servers and dishwashers and maître d’s who are fighting that fight every day,” Gordinier said in the article.

Two St. Louis-area restaurants also made the list: Indo and Balkan Treat Box.

The list is up on Esquire.com and will be in the magazine’s Winter 2020 issue, which should be out by December.

This story was originally published November 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM.