Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que is an award-winning barbecue restaurant, formerly known as Oklahoma Joe's with locations in the Kansas City area, owned and operated by Jeff and Joy Stehney.
Contents
History
Oklahoma Joe's can be traced to competition barbecue and the Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS). Tagging along with friends at the American Royal and The Great Lenexa BBQ Battle was all the inspiration Jeff Stehney needed to get started cooking on his own. The first smoker purchased was an Oklahoma Joe’s 24” smoker, christened in April 1991. The competition team, Slaughterhouse Five, won eight Grand Championships, including the prestigious American Royal BBQ, three Reserve Grand Championships, and the KCBS’s Grand Champion “Team of the Year” in 1993. Over the next several seasons Slaughterhouse Five won dozens more awards and was generally recognized as one of the top competition BBQ teams in the country.
While on the competition circuit, the Stehneys became friends with Joe Davidson, founder and owner of the Oklahoma Joe's Smoker Company. Jeff and Joe decided to go into business together and opened Oklahoma Joe's in Stillwater, Oklahoma in 1996. Later that same year, they also opened the first Kansas City area location inside a gas station at the corner of 47th Avenue and Mission Road in Kansas City, Kansas.
In 1997, Joe Davidson sold his smoker company and moved to Texas. With none of the owners located in Oklahoma, the partners deciced to closed the Oklahoma location, and then Jeff and Joy Stehney bought out Joe's share of the Kansas City restaurant operation.
Joe Davidson moved back to Oklahoma, and after 14 years out of the restaurant business he re-opened his own version of Oklahoma Joe's in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma in 2011, followed by a second location in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2012. While the new Oklahoma restaurant's were using the same Oklahoma Joe's name as the Kansas City area restaurants, the different owners had distinctly different menus and variations in recipes. The Stehneys did not own rights to the Oklahoma Joe's name outside of the Kansas City area, and they became concerned that the operations of other locations could dilute the brand of their operations in Kansas City. The Stehneys met with Davidson and agreed to change the name of their restaurants, and in August 2014 they announced that the name of their three Kansas City area restaurants would be changed to Joe's Kansas City Bar-B-Que as of November 17, 2014. Their ownership and operation of the restaurants remains unchanged.