If you’ve spent any time doomscrolling lately, it’s possible you’ve come across a video talking about the restaurant KC Burgers. The restaurant has been open for the past six years but has recently been trending. Why? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is you cannot get the best burger in all of KC at KC Burgers. You can’t even get the second-best burger at KC Burger, or the third, or fourth. In fact, just go ahead and skip the burger at KC Burgers. Because the good news is you’re much better off ordering the goat curry, lamb leg or sambusa, all hailing from the well-spiced Somalian practices of Mohamed Awo and his parents.
Yes, in an ironic twist, KC Burgers is, in fact, a fast-casual Somali restaurant—with hilariously excellent search engine optimization. Awo, who bought the restaurant from his parents in August of last year, laughs when I ask about it. “It’s a marketing genius idea that they had,” he says, recalling his parent’s decision to name the restaurant after the quintessential American dish. His parents, who are from Somalia (Awo was born in Kenya), opened the restaurant in 2019 just east of Gates and PeachTree Cafeteria off 12th Street and Brooklyn Avenue. There’s no sugarcoating it. The front windows are lined with bars, and there’s an unmistakable crack in one of them from a bullet. The undercover Somali spot usually flows in and out with a mix of East African natives, women wearing hijabs and those coming in from Jum’ah, their Friday midday prayer—that is until recently.
“I don’t know what I did,” says 31-year-old Awo. “People just started making TikTok videos of us.”
The videos circulating online refer to KC Burgers as a hidden gem. In all my time as a food writer, I’ve found possibly no other restaurant more deserving of that overused phrase. It is, after all, a restaurant hiding in plain sight, and there’s something wonderfully incongruous about walking into a restaurant advertising burgers and stumbling upon one of KC’s few Somali restaurants.
Awo had never considered working in a restaurant before his mom asked him to take over the family business, but entrepreneurship is in his blood. He says his dad, Bahasan Said, is a “big icon” throughout KC’s Somali community, having owned a grocery store and another restaurant before opening KC Burgers. It’s obvious Awo is a people person, and his congenial disposition comes in handy when customers come in confused, which they often do nowadays.
The restaurant’s outside sign, which reads “KC Burgers: African Middle Eastern Food,” is flanked by pictures of highly stylized burgers, towering with frilly lettuce, a shiny beef patty and a domed sesame seed bun. Inside the restaurant, similar pictures accompany the American menu items—chicken tenders and a grilled chicken sandwich, for example—as if they were plucked straight from a Burger King drive-thru board. Feel free to skip the burger here, though Awo and his team are happy to customize one to your liking with sauteed onions, jalapenos and more. It’s what sits below and to the right of those American favorites that you’ll actually want to enjoy.
Any of the sukhar, or suqaar, dishes—chopped lamb or beef sauteed with vegetables and various spices—are popular KC Burger hits, and the kabob is recognizable to most non-East Africans. Almost everything is served with a thin green salsa (which is great with the meats) and rice. Awo can only tell me that the rice, fluffy and imbued with earthy aromas, is spiced with whole cinnamon sticks. Stewy meat or maybe even a whole lamb leg is often served on a bed of the fluffy rice. The amount of food served for one meal is copious.
Unsurprisingly, there were many things on the menu that I didn’t recognize, like the “KK with chicken,” which is a mound of chopped chapati, or flatbread, stewed with chicken, onions, green peppers and beans. Think of chapati as a Somali tortilla, but more dense and a little sweeter. Traditionally, Somalis eat it with every dish, and at KC Burgers you’ll also find the flatbread used for wraps. Then there’s the “four person sport” or “five person sport” menu items. Awo says a “sport” dish is common at any Somali restaurant and is a variety plate where you can order two meats with rice and pasta. It’s large, and because Somalis typically eat with their hands, you’re meant to dig into it. (There is plastic silverware available, however).
Some traditional Somali dishes, like pasta, are influenced by Italy’s colonization of Somalia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of my friends referred to KC Burgers’ pasta, which is spaghetti noodles tossed with tomato paste and ramped up with spices, as a “ketchup pasta”—and he loved it. Meanwhile there is the option to order a “federation,” which just refers to a half-and-half mix of rice and pasta. Its name is from the Italian word meaning “union.”
A few items are not on the menu but available upon request, such as bananas. Bananas accompany many meals in Somalia and are eaten in bites with sukhars, rice, tilapia, and more. “Even with the pasta?” I ask. “Even with the pasta,” says Awo, who goes on to explain that any Somali who comes into his restaurant will just know to ask for a banana with their meal.
Even beyond the burger, most everything at KC Burgers can be customized to your liking. If you don’t like the sticky red barbecue-like sauce on the chicken, you can ask for it without. If you’d rather substitute fries for rice in your meal, you shouldn’t, but you can.
With all this new attention to his restaurant, Awo says he’s enjoying the new clientele and is always willing to help customers with any questions they might have. He wants to elevate his space with some new decor. He’s proud of the new tiling behind the counter and the custom stickers he created for the restaurant’s house-made mango and strawberry smoothies. Eventually, he wants to build a “hall of fame” wall with the famous people who have visited his restaurant, like the Somali TikToker Saber Aidarus (@saberoh_ ) and Chiefs wide receiver Rashee Rice. Rice has been into the restaurant several times and now parks in front of the restaurant instead of the side parking lot, something only a familiar customer would do, Awo says.
Unlike most trends, it seems unlikely that KC Burgers will “fizzle out.” The restaurant already has a solid customer base as one of the three Somali restaurants in KC (Yasmeen Cafe and the restaurant inside the Somali Mall at Independence Avenue and Olive Street are the other two), so whether TikTokers are hyping it up or not, it doesn’t look like it will be going anywhere soon.
