Mother Road meals, in Missouri and beyond

PART 3
QUEEN’S GATE in Springfield, the newly dedicated monument to the Birthplace of Route 66, provides a new photo op in the“Queen City of the Ozarks,” third-largest city in Missouri and home to a wide array of dining experiences.
QUEEN’S GATE in Springfield, the newly dedicated monument to the Birthplace of Route 66, provides a new photo op in the“Queen City of the Ozarks,” third-largest city in Missouri and home to a wide array of dining experiences.

The Route 66 experience is as much about the meals as it is the miles, we’d learned decades ago, when an impromptu jaunt to the Cadillac Ranch west of Amarillo wound up with a birthday dinner at The Big Texan on the city’s eastern fringes.

So today, rested up after the early-morning Route 66 Centennial Kickoff in a city where we knew little about the foodscape, we consulted the expert.

T. Lindsay Ba…