Kansas City, my childhood home, has made three great contributions to society - the Negro League Monarchs; a distinctive, fluid, bluesy style of jazz and barbeque.

The 'Que, like the music, is unmistakable. Slow smoked over hickory wood with a deep, dark sauce thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, spiced up enough for a slow burn in the back of your throat and sweetened with molasses.

My visits home, like this one, are an exercise in gluttony. It's nearly impossible to get bad 'Que here. But the best, the very best, is Arthur Bryant's. Downtown, just off I-70 and near the old Sears warehouse that closed so many years ago nobody can quite remember when it was, it has a long red and white awning with a narrow entrance to a good sized lot.

Respectable citizens will warn you about the neighborhood. Ignore them.

You pick up your own plate from a stack at the end of the line and hand it to the cook. "Whatcha haven'?"

A brick smoker, old and sooty, takes up nearly all the space behind the counter. It starts with two pieces of white Wonderbread on the bottom to soak up the sauce, topped with a soldier's row of short end pork ribs. Your sides come on the side at the end. Get 'em from the cashier in the maroon Bryant's smock. The cook doesn't deal in potato salad. This is smoked meat only.

I put in my order, carried my plate to the register and asked for three bottles of the house sauce to take home, each one wrapped up in brown meat paper and taped shut.

Blackened on the outside, pink from the smoke on the inside and so tender you could gum it off the bone, the ribs were every bit as good as they were supposed to be. The paper napkins, stacked on each dingy table, piled up in a saucy, crumpled mound next to my plate, getting taller with each bone cleaned and discarded.

It's mostly about the food. Ninety percent about the food. But for me, an adopted Angelino likely to die under a palm tree, it's a little bit about touching my roots - touching them and licking my fingers clean.