Jason Sudeikis Keeps Sending the World to Gates Bar-B-Q. This Summer, Ted Lasso Filmed Inside It.
Gates Bar-B-Q has greeted Kansas City with the same holler since 1946. Now Ted Lasso has filmed inside it, and Jason Sudeikis, the show's KC-raised star, keeps naming it his hometown pick, most recently to People. A family institution is having a national moment.
Walk through the door of a Gates Bar-B-Q in Kansas City and, before you have found the end of the line or read a word of the menu, a voice hits you from behind the counter: HI, MAY I HELP YOU. It is loud on purpose, and it has been the first thing customers hear at Gates for the better part of eighty years. This summer that same counter got a new kind of visitor. A camera crew from one of the most watched comedies on television set up inside a Gates dining room to film, of all things, a show about an American coaching soccer in London.
The show is Ted Lasso, and its star, Jason Sudeikis, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs eating this city's barbecue. He has spent years quietly routing the rest of the world toward his hometown joints, and in early August the celebrity magazine People ran a fresh exclusive on his go-to Gates order. A neighborhood institution that has never advertised much beyond that holler at the door is, all at once, having a national moment. This is the story of how a family barbecue stand from 1946 became a set piece for a global hit, and why one actor's dinner order keeps making headlines.
The Holler That Has Greeted Kansas City Since 1946
Gates started with a purchase, not a recipe. In 1946, George and Arzelia Gates bought a small restaurant called Ol' Kentuck Bar-B-Q near 19th and Vine, the heart of Kansas City's Black cultural district, and put the family name over the door. For its first decade it was a single storefront trying to hold its own in a city that already took its smoked meat seriously.
The turn came when the founder's son came home from the Army. Ollie Gates joined the business in 1956, the year the company became Gates & Son's, and he brought an engineer's eye to a barbecue stand. He redesigned the pits and the flow of the kitchen, treating a plate of ribs as a problem of throughput as much as taste. When George Gates died in 1960, Ollie took over, and over the following decades he grew the single stand into a small chain of locations across the Kansas City metro, each one opening the same way, with that shouted greeting the instant a customer crosses the threshold.
The greeting is not a gimmick so much as a signature. Regulars brace for it, newcomers jump at it, and either way it tells you where you are. It is the sound of a place that decided long ago that service should feel like being called on by name, and it has outlasted trends, ownership handoffs, and the slow reshaping of the neighborhood it was born in. Ollie Gates, who has run the company since that 1960 handoff and is now in his nineties, built a brand on the idea that the welcome matters as much as the meat.
From Henry Perry to Ted Lasso's Laptop
To understand why a Gates cameo means something, it helps to know the lineage it sits inside. Kansas City barbecue traces back to a single man, Henry Perry, a cook who began selling smoked meat downtown in the early twentieth century and earned the title of the city's barbecue father. Two of the most famous houses in town, Gates and Arthur Bryant's, both descend from Perry's line, which makes them less like competitors and more like cousins who took the same inheritance in different directions.
That heritage is now formally enshrined. In 2021, Ollie Gates and the late Arthur Bryant were inducted together into the barbecue hall of fame, a recognition that the two men had done more than run restaurants. They had defined a regional style, burnt ends and all, that the rest of the country would spend decades trying to copy. Arthur Bryant's is the house often credited with turning burnt ends from a giveaway scrap into a menu star, the smoky, charred points of the brisket that Kansas City claims as its own invention.
Sudeikis knows all of this the way a local does. Asked on the interview show Hot Ones to lay out his ideal Kansas City barbecue crawl, he assigned each dish to a specific house without hesitating, calling for burnt ends from Gates, pulled pork from Joe's, sides from Jack Stack, turkey from Q39, and brisket from Arthur Bryant's. He has gone further than talking, too. During the original run of Ted Lasso, he slipped a photo of Arthur Bryant's onto Ted's laptop as the on-screen wallpaper, a wink only Kansas Citians would catch, and the restaurant answered by hanging a Believe sign of its own and adopting the slogan Believe in BBQ.
A Sitcom Set in London, Filmed in a Midtown Barbecue Joint
The laptop cameo was a joke. The fourth season turned it into a location shoot. When Ted Lasso returned to production, it brought its cameras home to Sudeikis's Kansas City, and Gates Bar-B-Q was one of the marquee stops. The crew filmed at the Gates on Main Street in Midtown, folding a working barbecue counter into a story that is otherwise set an ocean away in England.
For the people who work there, it was a brush with a production most of them only knew from a screen. A Gates supervisor with three decades behind the counter stepped in to play a waitress in the scene, trading her real shifts for a scripted one. The season, which folds Kansas City landmarks into its backdrop and gives the city a featured role, is set to reach viewers in the summer of 2026, which means millions of people who have never smelled a Gates pit are about to watch one fill the frame.
It is a strange and flattering position for a family business to land in. Gates did not chase a product placement or buy its way into a storyline. It got there because the man at the center of the show could not stop pointing at it, and because the show decided the most honest way to shoot his hometown was to shoot the places he actually eats.
Why a Barbecue Order Became a Hometown Signal
The People exclusive that ran in early August was, on its surface, a small item: a celebrity naming a sandwich. What made it travel is the thing underneath. When a person who could eat anywhere on Earth keeps naming the same counter in his hometown, the order stops being a preference and becomes a declaration of where he is from. Gates has spent eighty years earning that kind of loyalty one greeting at a time, and it is now being repaid in a currency no ad budget can buy.
For a barbecue house, that loyalty is the whole business model. People do not drive across a metro for the closest smoked meat. They drive for the one tied to a memory, a first job, a grandparent, a Friday-night routine, and they defend it the way they defend a home team. What the last few weeks have shown is that the pull works at national scale too. A show set in London can send a viewer in Ohio looking up a Kansas City address, and a single order can become a piece of a city's identity. The holler at the door was never really about efficiency. It was about making sure that everyone who walked in, star or stranger, left feeling like a regular.
Sources
Building Kansas City: The Gates Family and OG Investment, LISC Kansas City.
Gates Bar-B-Q, history and locations, Wikipedia.
Kansas City Barbecue Legends Ollie Gates and Arthur Bryant Inducted Into Hall of Fame, KCUR.
9 Over 90: Ollie Gates, Kansas City Magazine.
Ted Lasso films season 4 at midtown Gates BBQ; veteran employee fills in as waitress, KSHB.
Ted Lasso fans can visit these Kansas City filming locations from season 4, AOL.
A first look at Ted Lasso season 4 and Kansas City's featured role, FOX4 Kansas City.
Popular Kansas City barbecue spot shows up in Ted Lasso episodes, FOX4 Kansas City.
Where Jason Sudeikis eats in Kansas City, and what he orders every time, EntertainmentNow.