photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Kelly Magee, owner of Q39, said the company's downtown Lawrence restaurant will open in March. She's pictured Feb. 6, 2026 inside the dining room space of the restaurant, which is still under construction.

With tables and chairs arriving this week, Q39 barbecue owner Kelly Magee is reasonably confident in saying that the restaurant’s new downtown Lawrence location will have its grand opening on March 10.

That’s something, given that confidence isn’t an emotion that has been overflowing since Magee launched the idea for a Q39 expansion into Lawrence nearly three years ago.

“I almost bit off more than I can chew,” Magee said during an interview on Friday.

In case you have forgotten, Q39 will occupy a portion of the former Journal-World printing plant near Sixth and New Hampshire streets in the northern end of downtown. When the project was announced, Kansas City developer Vince Bryant had plans to redevelop the entire Journal-World printing plant. (Note: The Journal-World is not involved in the development, as the paper’s previous owners own the printing plant.)

The space would become a new destination and a northern gateway to the downtown district. A tech company would occupy class A office space in a portion of the building, while the remainder of the printing plant would house a trendy food hall business full of creative and emerging restauranteurs. The cherry on top was a unique indoor-outdoor entertainment and gathering spot that could host everything from ice skating to intimate concerts to KU watch parties.

Locating one of Kansas City’s most popular and awarded barbecue restaurants right next door to all of that was an idea that brimmed with confidence.

But then, bit by bit, the pieces of that development began to fall away. Bryant became embroiled in challenges with his other business ventures in Kansas City, and the idea of the food hall and the indoor/outdoor plaza area were dropped. Just this week, what has been rumored for months became official — the high-tech business Alarm.com confirmed it has shifted its plans from the printing plant site and now intends to locate elsewhere in downtown.

Q39 is the last piece of the plan left standing.

That’s because Magee decided she would not walk away. Instead, she decided that she would buy in, literally. The original plan was for developer Bryant to handle all the big development issues of the site. But when his plans changed, Magee’s business ended up buying the portion of the Journal-World printing plant that Q39 will occupy. (It used to be the newspaper’s mailroom and loading dock, if you are keeping track at home.)

Importantly, she also would take over all the development matters, such as getting the needed utilities to the space. That spot of the building had nowhere near the utility infrastructure needed to support a restaurant, and making it so ended up being a much bigger undertaking than expected, Magee said. The project also needed financial incentives from City Hall — a special taxing district that helps pay for infrastructure costs — that drew some opposition and was in doubt, at times.

All of this was happening while multiple interests in Kansas City were trying to convince her that she should change plans and choose their locations for Q39’s next restaurant. As Magee said, there were plenty of potential “off ramps” from the Lawrence project.

Instead, it was straight ahead, with hopes this Lawrence road wasn’t leading to a cliff.

“There were other opportunities that might have been more lucrative,” Magee said of the deals she was being presented with. “But this was the one that tugged at my heart strings harder. Our ‘why’ sometimes isn’t always based on the money.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Q39, located in a portion of the former Journal-World printing plant near Sixth and New Hampshire streets, will have a patio that is expected to seat about 100 people.

•••

Sometimes the ‘why’ can be hard to comprehend.

In 2013, her husband, Rob Magee, wanted to open a barbecue restaurant. He was a classically-trained chef from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America who had gotten talked into entering barbecue competitions by some friends.

He ended up being good, really good. His team, the Munchin’ Hogs, won multiple national championships.

But a restaurant, really?

Kelly, with a business degree from KU, and, at the time, 13 years of business development experience with Hallmark, understood a profit and loss statement. She understood some of the ugliest could be found in the restaurant industry.

But, Rob was really good.

They sat together at the banker’s office, signing the documents for the loan to open their first restaurant — on 39th Street in midtown — and Kelly still remembers the feeling of signing her life away.

“They want everything,” Kelly recalled of signing the loan documents that pledged the house, the life insurance policies and numerous other assets to back the loan. “It is like every asset you have, they want it.”

Rob looked at her and said: “Failure is not an option.”

That was in late 2013. By mid-2014, Q39 had opened. Seven years later, Rob died from colon cancer, about five years after being diagnosed with the disease.

There were no easy answers for that ‘why,’ but there were a lot of questions about ‘what,’ as in what to do next?

“I think Rob wanted me to relax, because we worked so hard to get to where we were,” Kelly said. “I think he knew I could bow out, and be done, and really just sell the business. And I was kind of set up to do that.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

One of two bar areas is shown at Q39 in downtown Lawrence. This bar opens onto a large patio area.

But the restaurant business had about 200 employees at that time. It had started with 35 and a speech. The speech was from Rob telling the staff that this start-up barbecue restaurant — in a town full of them — was going to become the best restaurant in Kansas City.

“I stepped back and thought, ‘Let’s pay the bills,'” Kelly recalled. “Let’s start with that.”

The restaurants — there were after the opening of an Overland Park location — had great success and did pay the bills. But they weren’t just paying Kelly’s bills, she remembered. They also were paying the bills of those 200 employees. That thought made the idea of selling the restaurants less appealing. It also helped her come to a realization.

“I decided I wasn’t done yet,” she said.

The dining room space of Q39, pictured on Feb. 6, 2026, is expected to seat about 100 people, owner Kelly Magee, left said.

•••

Fast-forward five years, and Magee decided she wasn’t done with Lawrence either. For one, she is a KU graduate from that magical year of 1988. On top of that, three of her four children attended KU, and she already had bought a house in Lawrence to house them and other relatives who are attending the university.

Plus, there was a full circle-moment in the decision to open a barbecue restaurant in Lawrence. While a student at KU, she was a server for Buffalo Bob’s Smokehouse. The building that housed that former downtown barbecue staple is less than a two-minute walk from Q39’s new location. Being back in downtown Lawrence seemed right.

“It is kind of a shining example, truly,” Magee said of downtown and its traditional charm.

Now, she and her team are about to find out whether the community is ready for a slightly different kind of barbecue restaurant. Magee said Q39 is considered more of an upscale barbecue establishment. Tables are adorned with linen napkins, the food comes on plates, not butcher block paper and plastic baskets. A key phrase of the restaurant is “chef driven,” and indeed the company employs three graduates from the Culinary Institute of America, including one who will be at the Lawrence restaurant.

“What that means is we truly are a scratch kitchen,” Andrew Kneessy, the company’s brand expansion executive and a trained chef, said. “We don’t open a can of beans. We soak them,” “We don’t buy potato salad. We buy potatoes.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Andrew Kneessy, brand expansion executive for Q39, is pictured next to one of the restaurant’s BBQ smokers on Feb. 6, 2026.

Yes, that does mean both baked beans and potato salad will be on the menu of this upscale barbecue restaurant. The menu has all of the traditional items you associate with barbecue, but it also includes Kansas City strip steak, Canadian salmon, sides of orzo pasta salad, and a full dessert menu that includes everything from cookies and brownies to honey-soaked bread pudding.

As you would expect, though, the menu is dominated by beef, pork and chicken barbecue dishes. Magee said the restaurant’s brisket plate is its No. 1 seller. It, like all the beef dishes, comes from certified Angus beef, and is finished off with an extra layer of smoke from the kitchen’s wood fired grill.

But the biggest characteristic of the restaurant’s barbecue, Magee said, is that it all goes from “pit to plate.” None of the barbecue is made days ahead and then reheated. That’s the way Rob insisted it be done, and it continues to be so. Five years after his death, his imprint on the restaurant is heavy, both in what it has and what it doesn’t.

“There’s not a single microwave on the premise,” Kelly said.

Rob’s mark will be particularly present during the restaurant’s opening month. Though the opening is later than Kelly once anticipated, it may be fitting. March is National Colon Cancer Awareness Month. The restaurant will be serving a special dish — Rob’s Rueben — with all the proceeds from sales of that dish going to the KU Cancer Center’s colon cancer research and treatment programs.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Scenes of downtown Lawrence’s New Hampshire Street corridor are visible from the butcher shop room of Q39, pictured on Feb. 6, 2026.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Among the additions to the former mailroom and printing dock space of the Journal-World is a skylight to bring more light into Q39’s dining room.