photo by: Contributed

Steve Mock, a Lawrence native, is pictured Friday, Feb. 7, 2025, outside the Pour House bar in New Orleans, which will be a Chiefs hub during Super Bowl weekend.

In his two decades of living in one of the world’s great party cities, Steve Mock has seen his share of revelry, but no celebration is likely to be as special to him as the one this weekend at a bar he co-runs near the New Orleans Superdome, where Super Bowl LIX will be played Sunday evening.

Mock, a Lawrence native and lifelong Kansas City fan, has the venue — the Pour House on Girod Street — decked out in red and gold with loads of barbecue on hand for Chiefs fans hungry to see their team nix the Philadelphia Eagles and notch a Super Bowl three-peat.

Mock, who grew up in Lawrence and graduated from KU in 1995, made his way to The Big Easy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He had been working in construction in Kansas, but his wife at the time was originally from Louisiana, and they headed to the Mississippi Delta to help the city rebuild.

The marriage and the construction career eventually ran out of steam, but Mock hung around and got a job with UPS, where he indulged his love of cooking by preparing meals for coworkers, as he had always done for friends and family. Barbecued chicken, smoky briskets and — bizarre to this Southern crowd — burnt ends.

“Nobody down here even know what that was,” he said. “They were like, ‘You shouldn’t be eating burnt food; you’re in the wrong place.'”

But once they had a taste, he said, their opposition vanished and they asked for more.

One December day in 2017, Mock decided to go with his gut and quit his UPS job.

His wife, Maureen, wondered what the heck he would do now.

“I was like, ‘What if we open a restaurant?’ And she’s like ‘Are you crazy?'” he said.

“Well, maybe,” he replied, thinking the worst that could happen was that it would fail, but the possibility of failure was a happier thought than the thought of “looking back in 20 years and thinking ‘Man, I wish we had at least tried it.”

By the next year, the couple had opened a barbecue joint called Smoked — with a KU flag by the door — in the suburb of Harahan, about a 20-minute drive west of New Orleans.

And any fear of failure subsided like floodwaters.

The couple’s restaurant, which he still describes as a mom-and-pop shop with just a handful of employees, has gained a devoted following – and attracted the notice of the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans, the city’s NFL and NBA teams, whom he know cooks for a couple of times a month as a guest chef.

His food also attracted the notice of one of his regular customers at Smoked, Michael Williams, who happened to own a couple of bars in town, including the Pour House, just down the road from the Superdome. The bar had unremarkable “bar food,” Williams told Mock, but he wanted to serve eats that people would love and talk about and come back for.

“So we partnered last March,” said Mock, who supplies signature barbecue dishes to the establishment daily.

And now, a year later, the three-story corner bar with a balcony in the heart of NOLA is throwing a “crazy” weekend-long party that is expected to draw hundreds of people, including some VIPs and lots of live music. Most importantly, the venue will be decked out with red and gold from Mock’s native land, which he still has tons of affection for.

“I miss it back there,” he said of Kansas, but maybe this weekend, especially if his Chiefs win, Lawrence won’t feel so far away.