ON THE NIGHT the Kansas City Chiefs earned a second consecutive trip to the Super Bowl, a local chef named Mano Rafael cried in his kitchen. This qualifies as news in K.C.'s River Market neighborhood, where Rafael's bunker of a restaurant, Le Fou Frog, has been an anchor through blight and now revitalization. Mano, crying? Yelling, his longtime customers would have believed. The restaurant is often alive with sound: one of his daughters serenading diners with a song, or the chef himself launching into a curse-laden tirade in his native French. But tears? That doesn't sound like Mano at all. He's a tough guy, born in the hard port city of Marseille, a veteran of cutthroat New York kitchens and now, alongside his wife, Barbara, the master of ceremonies at his own perfect restaurant, where the combination of magic light and the best steak in Kansas City has made the place a fixture. Not as much of a fixture as Patrick Mahomes, but a fixture nonetheless.
Barb laughed the next day about his tears. Something about this Chiefs team speaks to Mano. He's always felt a bit like an outsider in Missouri, famous for turning his white-tablecloth culinary palace into a sports bar during French World Cup games -- for never letting the years across the ocean blunt his connection to home. Mano lives in Kansas City, but he is from Marseille, his restaurant practically a sovereign piece of French soil like an embassy or a warship or something. But this team -- the communal experience of last season's Super Bowl victory, when the city almost took flight with ecstasy, combined with the comfort the continued winning brought throughout this difficult year -- has captured his heart.
"I guess," Barb Rafael says, "he finally feels a part of his adopted city."
KANSAS CITY IS a big, modern city, with great restaurants, great neighborhoods and schools, and running through it all, a sense of civic pride more commonly seen in a much smaller place. Natives call it a town. But the usual flip side to civic pride is also part of Kansas City's self-identity: a nagging feeling of insecurity, that Denver is cooler, or Chicago is more metropolitan, a looking to the east and to the west with the idea that something might be better just over the horizon.