The City Changed Overnight. I Noticed It at Breakfast.
☕ Cool Girl City + 🍜 The Curious Table
I didn’t notice it at the stadium.
I noticed it at Target.
Two guys in matching jerseys, full-size luggage parked in the middle of the aisle, squinting at the reading glasses display like it held the answers to very important questions. British accents. World Cup visitors, clearly, doing what all of us do in a new city before we figure out where anything actually is: ending up at Target.
That’s when I knew the World Cup had arrived in Kansas City.
Not the billboards. Not the fan zones. Not the billboards. Not the fan zones. Not even the giant KC heart installations downtown. The World Cup arrived the same way everything real arrives in a city, quietly, sideways, in the places nobody thought to make official.
My mom called me the next morning. She’d been at Planet Fitness at 3am (she keeps odd hours, this is normal) and there was a soccer player on the treadmill running at what she described as “50mph for 45 minutes straight” while the other three people in the building tried very hard to act like they weren’t watching. “We were all watching,” she said. “Nobody said anything. It was like a nature documentary.”
This is Kansas City right now. The world showed up and it’s just out here, in the eye care aisle, on the treadmill, in line at the coffee shop.
I should tell you: I didn’t grow up thinking of Kansas City as a global city. When I left for South Korea in 2011, fresh out of college, KC felt like the place I was leaving in order to find the world. Then Chicago in 2017. And every time I came back, something had shifted, another restaurant, another community, another block that felt like it belonged somewhere else entirely.
The Missouri side had always had pockets of it. But the Kansas side? That changed while I was gone. The global food scene that now exists in Lenexa and Overland Park is genuinely new, built by people who arrived and decided to stay and make something. I wrote about all of it in my World Cup guide, mostly because I wanted people to see what I kept discovering on my own.
Which is part of why this month has felt so strange and exciting. The World Cup didn’t create KC’s global identity. But it’s the first time I’ve watched the rest of the world show up here and find it.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to get swept up the way I did.
I’ve been following the tournament more closely than usual since curating the guide, more tuned in than I’ve ever been to a World Cup before. My mom and I were at a local Mexican restaurant earlier this week when the speakers suddenly cut to something unexpected: the South African national anthem, full volume, filling the whole dining room.
We looked at each other.
Then the Mexican national anthem came on. The workers behind the counter started cheering.
We couldn’t help it. We got pulled in. So much so that we left and drove straight to Target to find Mexico jerseys I’d spotted the day before, after discovering H&M was already sold out. Target didn’t have the styles we wanted. We left with something else and felt only slightly defeated.
But here’s the thing: we were at a Mexican restaurant, then a sold-out H&M, then a Target on a jersey hunt we hadn’t planned, all because a national anthem came through a speaker and made something click. That’s the World Cup. That’s what it does. It sneaks into a Tuesday and makes it feel like something.
Here’s my honest take, one week in:
Kansas City had to grow into this moment. It didn’t start global, it became global, slowly, neighborhood by neighborhood, restaurant by restaurant. And now a hundred thousand visitors showed up and the city had to introduce itself for the first time to an audience this size.
It turns out the introduction was pretty good.
I’ll be writing all month about what that looks like from street level. Not from the stadiums. From the cafés, the corridors, the places that were here before the World Cup and will be here long after it.
And that’s the story I’m interested in telling. Starting tomorrow with Argentina.
Explore the full World Cup Food Guide at theyearofapril.com/beyondthebbq – a map of KC’s global food scene built for people who want the real city, not the tour bus version.
Explore the themes of this post:
☕ Cool Girl City
Cities are more than attractions.
Cool Girl City follows the small discoveries, neighborhood moments, café visits, unexpected conversations, and everyday adventures that make a place memorable. These stories are about how a city feels when you slow down and pay attention.
Explore more Cool Girl City stories →
🍜 The Curious Table
Food is never just food.
The Curious Table explores destinations through meals, markets, cafés, traditions, and the people who gather around them. Instead of restaurant reviews, these stories focus on culture, identity, migration, and the connections that happen across a table.
