Now Open in Kansas City, The World’s First Barbecue Museum Is a Feast for the Senses Jump in the bean-themed ball pit, solve a pork puzzle and pose with a championship mustard belt at the new Museum of BBQ The museum is filled with interactive exhibits and activities, including a bean-themed ball pit play area. Ben Pieper Photo From tender beef brisket to succulent pork spare ribs, barbecue is a beloved staple of American cuisine and culture. You can learn all about this delicious food tradition at the Museum of BBQ, which opened on April 12 in Kansas City, Missouri. First announced last fall, the new venue houses ten interactive installations designed to educate visitors about the history and significance of smoked meats and sides. Museumgoers can touch five types of wood commonly used to fuel smokers, smell the spices often used in barbecue rubs and play a ring toss game while learning about the “smoke ring” that forms in meat during the smoking process. For young visitors—as well as those who are young at heart—the museum has a ball pit featuring 8,000 tannish-brown orbs designed to mimic barbecued beans, reports the Kansas City Star’s Tammy Ljungblad. Visitors can learn about dry rubs, sauces, meats and more. Ben Pieper Photo Other hands-on activities include a pork puzzle and a sauce room with squishy, sauce-inspired floor tiles, according to NPR’s Frank Morris. The museum’s entrance is designed to look like the door of a commercial smoker, too. A large section of the museum is dedicated to four regions of American barbecue: the Carolinas, Texas, Memphis and Kansas City. Visitors can learn about the specific barbecue traditions, customs and practices that are unique to each region. The interactive activities continue in this part of the venue, too. Guests can pose for a photo with a championship mustard belt, in a nod to the mustard-based sauce that’s so popular in South Carolina. They can also enjoy “rib ticklers,” or barbecue-themed dad jokes. For guests who want to bring home a little souvenir, the museum has a well-stocked gift shop with barbecue-themed merch, sauces, rubs, spices and other mementos. Spanning roughly 4,000 square feet, the museum is filled with colorful murals. Ben Pieper Photo The Museum of BBQ is the brainchild of Jonathan Bender, a food writer and barbecue judge who spent the past six years working on the project. He also collaborated with Alex Pope, a Kansas City butcher and chef who co-owns a whole animal butcher shop called Local Pig. For Bender, barbecue is all about the camaraderie. “One of the things I love about barbecue is that you’re going to tell me your favorite place and I’m going to tell you my favorite place,” he tells KSHB’s Tod Palmer. “We can argue or banter back and forth, but we’ll still sit down and have the meal together afterwards, which feels great.” In Bender’s opinion, Kansas City, which has more than 100 barbecue restaurants, was the perfect place to open the world’s first barbecue museum. It also hosts several competitions, including the World Series of Barbecue and the Great Lenexa BBQ Battle, and it’s home to the Barbecue Hall of Fame. A Black chef named Henry Perry first introduced Kansas City to this flavor-packed cuisine when he arrived from Memphis in the early 1900s. Perry, who called himself the “Barbecue King,” became famous for cooking meat in a brick-lined pit in the ground. “Barbecue and Kansas City have been inexorably linked for more than a century,” Bender tells WDAF-TV’s Carey Wickersham and Olivia Johnson. “It’s a true melting pot of barbecue. When we thought of where to put the museum, no other place in the world made sense.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.