How we choose

Worth the drive.

What Worth Crossing is, how a place gets in, and where every story comes from.

Most of us shop in three or four neighborhoods and drive past the rest. Worth Crossing Kansas City is a weekly magazine and email about the independent shops, makers and kitchens on the far side of those lines that are worth the trip, in Missouri and Kansas. Each issue has one longer drive, a handful of picks and the dated things worth crossing town for that week. It is independent and published by Ajay Krishnan.

How a place gets in

A place gets in when it does something specific and says so on its own pages, gives someone from the other side of the metro a reason to come that they can’t find nearer home, and is open now, with hours or dates we can point to, so we can tell you when to go. The choice is ours. Shops are welcome to tell us about themselves, but nobody pays to be featured or approves what we write.

Where it comes from

Every story is built from the business’s own pages, official listings and public records. They are linked at the foot of the story, with the passage we relied on and the date we read it. What a business says about itself we report as its claim: “Krizman’s says it opened in 1939.” We never claim a visit, a tasting or an interview we didn’t do. Hours change, and the business always has the last word.

We use AI tools for research and editing. Until we visit a place, the image on its story is AI-generated and imagined, labeled as such, never a picture of the place. A photograph from a visit is credited and dated, and never shares a story with AI art.

Advertising

Worth Crossing is paid for by advertising, and these are the rules it follows:

• An issue’s stories are chosen before any conversation about advertising in it.
• Nobody pays to be featured, and a story never depends on an ad. Advertisers don’t see, approve or edit coverage before it runs.
• If a business we cover also advertises with us, the story says so.
• Every paid placement names who paid for it, on the page and in the email.
• No pay-for-review, and no “featured business” blocks inside a story.

Partner with Worth Crossing →

Corrections

Corrections appear, dated, on the story. An email can’t be unsent, so a correction to an emailed story is also noted in the next issue. Two early editions were online from October 2 to 5, 2026; we withdrew them before the first issue, and before any reader received them by email. Spotted something? Write to news@ajay.to.

Type

Fraunces, by the Fraunces Project Authors, and DM Sans, by the DM Sans Project Authors, are hosted locally under the SIL Open Font License.