Long-running Kansas City barbecue restaurant is back ‘under old management’
Woodyard Bar-B-Que has gone downhill.
That’s the assessment of Frank Schloegel III, and he would know. He’s owned the place for about 25 years.
“We’ve gotten away from what makes us special,” Schloegel, who is 83, said earlier this month.
His son, Frank Schloegel IV, agreed. “We need to bring the romance back.”
They were sitting at a table inside the Kansas City, Kansas, barbecue joint at 3001 Merriam Lane. It was lunchtime on a Thursday, and customers were scarce.
Not for long, they promised. Change is in the air. Ciaran Molloy, who came in to professionalize Woodyard’s operations after Guy Fieri and Anthony Bourdain stopped by and made it a destination, is out. The Schloegels have taken back control of the restaurant.
“We’re under old management,” Frank IV said.
They have plans to bring back the patio smoker, the one where a pitman used to tend the meats out front as the smoke drifted over Merriam Lane. A small brewery is in the works. Some menu updates are on the way. And Frank III’s hand-painted signs (“Slab of ribs $20, can a beer $2”) are once again prominent around the property.
The idea, in short, is a return to the kind of hands-on, wood-fired barbecue and folksy ambiance that drew the attention of TV cameras in the first place. It’s a tradition rooted in a local business that stretches back more than a century.
From woodyard to Woodyard
Frank III’s grandfather, a German immigrant, started the Southside Coal and Wood Co. in Westport in 1913. When coal collapsed after World War II, Frank III’s father shifted the focus to wood, renamed it Southside Wood Co., and moved the yard to Merriam Lane in the 1950s.
Barbecue was taking off in Kansas City, and pitmasters needed wood. Southside supplied it. Ollie Gates was a longtime customer.
“He bought 15 or 16 cords a week,” Frank III said. “He did that for 53 years. The only reason it stopped is because his son took over, and he always wanted a deal.”
Today, the Schloegel family still sells wood to a few restaurants like Jones BBQ, but most buyers are individuals stocking up for weekend cookouts and winter fireplaces.
In 1998, Frank III began catering small events using the same hickory and oak he sold. He also started selling barbecue ribs on Saturday for Southside customers. A few years later, the operation had morphed into a real restaurant.
Sort of. Orders were placed at a counter inside an old house, while Frank III’s cousin, Mark O’Bryan, cooked ribs, pork, and sausage over a smoker on the brick patio. A freight train screeched by five times a day. Out back, it was still an honest-to-God functioning wood yard, with stacks of oak, pecan, hickory, cherry and apple available for purchase. Maybe there was a dented pickup truck idling up front. Maybe there was a dog in the passenger seat, drooling.
Woodyard Bar-B-Que seemed to belong to a bygone era, the kind of place you hoped to stumble upon but thought no longer existed in modern America. For a while, it was a hidden gem. Then the internet made secrets hard to keep. By 2012, Woodyard’s irresistible story had made its way to Bourdain and Fieri. Each arrived that year to film segments for their travel shows.
Great for business. Tough for management.
“Somebody once told me, the first million is easy,” Frank III said. “The second million, you’ve got to really hustle for.”
He realized he needed a new partner to update operations and capitalize on all Woodyard’s new customers. He brought in Ciaran Molloy, at the time a manager at M&S Grill on the Country Club Plaza.
“They had employees walking tickets back to the kitchen when I got there,” Molloy said.
Molloy turned Woodyard into a smoother business, adding point-of-sale systems, expanding indoor seating, and modernizing the kitchen. But in the process, some of the rough edges that gave Woodyard its charm got sanded down. It wasn’t corporate, exactly. But it wasn’t a low-down barbecue shack anymore, either. Woodyard started to resemble the restaurants it once stood apart from.
Then came COVID and inflation. Meat prices skyrocketed. Crowds grew finicky. O’Bryan retired as the patio pitmaster.
“We never really recovered after COVID,” Molloy said.
What’s next for Woodyard Bar-B-Que?
Molloy said he had always planned to step away this year. He has sold his shares in the business back to the Schloegels and plans to return to his native Ireland in the next year.
That leaves Frank III and Frank IV to sort out Woodyard’s future. Currently, they are reaching down into a fifth generation of Schloegels for help. Oscar Scott, grandson of Frank III, manages a brewery in Florida but has been in town the past few months making some updates to the place.
“There’s so much potential here, and it just hasn’t been living up to that potential the past few years,” Scott said. “I’m trying to return it to what it was when the Food Network was here.”
“Oscar’s the energy guy, my dad’s the ideas guy, and then somebody has to be the money guy who deals with payroll and debts and stuff,” Frank IV said. “So I guess that’s me now.”
Woodyard is in the process of getting its liquor license back — it lapsed this summer — and will soon open a small brewery on the property, which they’re calling Boathouse Brewery. Expect new daily specials and more frequent live music out back.
Franktoberfest, an event featuring German dance music, will be held Saturday, Oct. 25. It’s meant to serve as a kind of grand reopening of Woodyard and an 84th birthday party for Frank III.
“The thing about getting old is, you can think a lot, you can talk a lot, you can toss out a lot of ideas — but you can’t really act on anything, because you can’t move around like you used to,” Frank III said.
He pointed to his son across the table and his grandson standing in the doorway. His daughter, Theresa, was down by the train tracks piling up logs for the wood business.
“Fortunately, I got all these people here to help me.”
This story was originally published October 15, 2025 at 12:53 PM.
