In-A-Tub

In-A-Tub is a Kansas City Northland institution dating to 1951 — one of the city’s oldest surviving independent food concepts. The signature product: a deep-fried taco shell loaded with beef and coated in neon orange powdered cheese — a format invented in Kansas City and found nowhere else. Two surviving locations (N. Oak Trafficway and Prairie View Rd), currently operated by siblings Aaron Beeman and Andrea Beeman LaMunyon, who bought the business in 2001.

Description

In-A-Tub is one of Kansas City’s oldest surviving food concepts — a drive-in taco stand founded in 1951 by Walt and Marion Carpenter, who started with an ice cream kiosk serving “50 flavors in a tub” before pivoting to the fried taco format that became their signature. The In-A-Tub taco is uniquely Kansas City: a deep-fried shell filled with seasoned beef and coated in a neon orange powdered cheese — a format invented here and found essentially nowhere else. Two Northland locations survive, on N. Oak Trafficway and Prairie View Road, operated by siblings Aaron Beeman and Andrea Beeman LaMunyon, who bought the business from Mike Scruby in 2001. KCUR ran a full feature on In-A-Tub in March 2025, calling it a Kansas City Northland tradition and exploring its 70+ year lineage; Kansas City Magazine covered its status as one of the city’s most distinctive regional food products. At 75 years old, In-A-Tub is the kind of KC original the Registry exists to document.

Menu

Last verified: 2026-08-13 (descriptions + source audit) / 2026-07-14 (prices, re-checked 2026-08-13 and unchanged) · Sources: AllMenus In-A-Tub listing (item set + prices)¹; In-A-Tub’s own legacy menu copy, preserved on the business’s Yelp menu page and sourced by Yelp from the restaurant’s former site at in-a-tub.com (descriptions only)² · URL(s): https://www.allmenus.com/mo/kansas-city/734650-in-a-tub/menu/ · https://www.yelp.com/menu/in-a-tub-kansas-city · Confidence: Medium-High on item set and structure; Medium on prices (aggregator-sourced, see caveat); High on the descriptions retained, which are now quoted operator copy rather than inference

In-A-Tub’s menu is a compact KC drive-in classic built around its signature deep-fried, powdered-cheese tacos, plus pocket burgers, burritos, dawgs, fried sides, and soft-serve.¹

Prices caveat. In-A-Tub has no website and no first-party online ordering, so no first-party price source exists. Every price below comes from AllMenus, which is a Grubhub-owned property; its own footer disclaims currency, and delivery-platform listings routinely carry a markup over the counter price. These are recorded as the best available figure, not as verified board prices. “ — counter prices from a photographed menu board at either location would settle it.

Descriptions ceiling and correction pass (2026-08-13). Sources checked: AllMenus (the current price source — it publishes four section blurbs and zero item-level descriptions); the Grubhub storefront it links to (returned no menu content, and would be a delivery-platform surface in any case); Facebook (page exists, not machine-readable); both Yelp listings — the Prairie View listing (in-a-tub-kansas-city-3) is unclaimed and carries no menu, the N. Oak listing (in-a-tub-kansas-city) carries a full sectioned menu with operator-written blurbs; and the Internet Archive for in-a-tub.com. The archive confirms the domain was the restaurant’s own WordPress site (it also hosted the In-A-Tub-sponsored cycling team) with a menu page at ?page_id=65 linking a downloadable PDF at /wp-content/uploads/2009/07/inatubmenu-11.pdf; that PDF was already returning 404 when first crawled in 2016 and no capture of its contents survives — the only 200-status captures are the Apache directory index. The Yelp menu is the surviving trace of that first-party copy: Yelp links it back to in-a-tub.com/?page_id=65, and its wording (“try our famous deep fried tacos”, “get 2 locally made tamales per order”, the misspellings powered cheese / Tostados / woffle cone) is operator-typed, not platform marketing.

Source reconciliation note. The two sources are used for different things and matched by section position and item name:

• Item set and prices: AllMenus only. The Yelp menu is older — it lists a Tamales section (plain / with cheese / with chili & cheese / everything) and a Bean And Cheese Taco that AllMenus does not, and omits burritos, taco salads, kids meals and several sides that AllMenus lists. No item is added to this page from the Yelp menu, and it carries no prices at all.
• Descriptions: Yelp preferred where both cover the same section, because its wording is fuller. Tacos — AllMenus “Deep fried, served with lettuces, sauce and powdered cheeze” vs Yelp “try our famous deep fried tacos. all tacos come with lettuce, sauce & powered cheese”; both agree on the build.
• Name mapping: Yelp “Regular Meat Taco” → AllMenus/this page “Regular Taco”; Yelp “Meat & Cheese Taco” → “Beef and Cheez Taco”; Yelp “Meat, Bean & Cheese Taco” → “Bean, Beef and Cheez Taco”; Yelp “Nacho Tostado” → “Nacho” (listed in the Tostadas section on both); Yelp “Tub Tornados” → “Tornado Ice Cream”; Yelp “Cones” → “Waffle Cone” / “Kiddy Cone”. Yelp’s Bean And Cheese Taco and all four Tamales lines have no AllMenus counterpart and were not imported.
• Retained after re-sourcing: the Everything Burrito gloss “chili, cheese, lettuce, sauce and onion” originated as the AllMenus section blurb on The Burrito, i.e. it had been assigned to a single line by inference. It is kept because the Yelp menu independently defines the operator’s “everything” build at item level — Tamales Everything: chili, cheese, lettuce, sauce & onion — the same five components in the same order.
• Declined: Yelp’s “Hot Dog W/ Chili Cheese” was not matched to AllMenus “Chili Dog” — plausible but not certain, and nothing turns on it.
• Obvious misspellings in section blurbs are quoted with normalized spelling; the wording is otherwise unaltered.

Descriptions removed as unsourced inference. An earlier pass generated item descriptions from item names. Audited against both sources 2026-08-13 and stripped: Soft Taco (“soft shell with lettuce, sauce, and powdered cheese” — inferred from the name, and directly contradicted by the section blurb, which says the tacos are deep fried); Nacho and Nachos (“nachos with powdered cheese” — pure name restatement); Nacho Burger (“nacho build with powdered cheese” — same); Small Taco Burger and Kids Taco (both had been given the Tacos section blurb although they sit in Pocket Burgers and Kids Meals respectively); the three tostada lines (given a paraphrase of the taco build — now replaced with the operator’s actual tostada copy, which specifies a flat corn shell, fried). Section blurbs that had been duplicated onto every line in their section now appear once, at section level, where the operator wrote them.

Tacos

“Try our famous deep fried tacos. All tacos come with lettuce, sauce and powdered cheese.”²¹

• Regular Taco ($1.56)¹
• Beef and Cheez Taco ($1.69)¹
• Bean, Beef and Cheez Taco ($1.84)¹
• Soft Taco ($3.15)¹

Tostadas

“A flat corn shell fried and topped with lettuce, sauce and powdered cheese.”²

• Bean Tostada ($2.19)¹
• Beef and Cheez Tostada ($2.93)¹
• Nacho ($3.47)¹

Taco Salads

Served with sour cream for an additional charge.¹

• Taco Salad ($5.16+)¹
• Shell Taco Salad ($6.49)¹

Burritos

• Plain Burrito ($2.91)¹
• Cheez Burrito ($3.09)¹
• Chili Burrito ($4.45)¹
• Chili and Cheez Burrito ($5.16)¹
• Everything Burrito — chili, cheese, lettuce, sauce and onion ($5.28)¹²

Pocket Burgers

• Regular Burger ($2.53+)¹
• Cheez Burger ($2.82+)¹
• Nacho Burger ($2.94+)¹
• Swiss Burger ($2.82+)¹
• Chili Burger ($2.82+)¹
• Small Taco Burger ($2.82)¹

Sandwiches

• Tenderloin Sandwich ($5.35)¹
• Italian Steak Sandwich ($4.95)¹

Chicken

• Dinner Chicken ($8.09)¹
• Chicken Strips ($6.11)¹
• Chicken Sandwich ($5.41)¹

Dawgs

• Hot Dog ($2.38)¹
• Chili Dog ($4.45)¹
• Korn Dog ($3.19)¹
• Chiwawa Pup ($2.67)¹

Kids Meals

Served with fries and a small drink.¹

• Kids Hot Dog ($4.98)¹
• Kids Korn Dog ($4.98)¹
• Kids Taco ($4.98)¹
• Kids Pocket Burger ($4.98)¹

Side Orders

• Fries ($2.24)¹
• Tater Tots ($2.24)¹
• Onion Rings ($2.68)¹
• Mushrooms ($3.48)¹
• Poppers ($4.89)¹
• Mozzarella Stix ($4.89)¹
• Nachos ($3.74)¹
• Cauliflower ($3.26)¹
• Apple Stix ($3.59)¹
• Corn Nuggets ($2.79)¹
• Chilipie ($2.55)¹
• Zucchini ($3.21)¹

Dessert

Soft-serve counter. Cones are vanilla soft serve, with a chocolate dip available.²

• Tornado Ice Cream — a candy mix-in treat: Oreo, Reese’s cup, Butterfinger, chocolate chip, or strawberry² ($3.35+)¹
• Sundae — vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, raspberry, butterscotch, chocolate chip, hot fudge, butter pecan, turtle, or apple stick² ($2.79)¹
• Waffle Cone ($2.11)¹
• Kiddy Cone ($1.27)¹

Shakes and malts are on the operator’s legacy menu — vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, raspberry, butterscotch, chocolate chip, hot fudge, cherry — but are not listed on the current price source, so no price is recorded.²

Beverages

• Fountain Drinks ($0.91+)¹

Sources

Footnotes

1. In-A-Tub (4000 N. Oak Trafficway) — menu listing on AllMenus (accessed 2026-07-14; re-scraped 2026-08-13, item set and every price unchanged). Asserts: full item set and prices as transcribed; four section blurbs — Tacos “Deep fried, served with lettuces, sauce and powdered cheeze”, Taco Salads “Served with sour cream for an additional charge”, The Burrito “Chili, cheese, lettuce, sauce and onion”, Kids Meals “Served with fries and a small drink”. Does not assert: any item-level description — there are none on this source. Aggregator caveat: AllMenus is a Grubhub property and its own footer disclaims that prices may not be current; treat prices as best-available, not board-verified. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴ ↩²⁵ ↩²⁶ ↩²⁷ ↩²⁸ ↩²⁹ ↩³⁰ ↩³¹ ↩³² ↩³³ ↩³⁴ ↩³⁵ ↩³⁶ ↩³⁷ ↩³⁸ ↩³⁹ ↩⁴⁰ ↩⁴¹ ↩⁴² ↩⁴³ ↩⁴⁴ ↩⁴⁵ ↩⁴⁶ ↩⁴⁷ ↩⁴⁸ ↩⁴⁹ ↩⁵⁰ ↩⁵¹ ↩⁵² ↩⁵³ ↩⁵⁴ ↩⁵⁵

2. In-A-Tub — the operator’s own legacy menu copy, preserved on the business’s Yelp menu page (accessed 2026-08-13). Yelp attributes this menu to the restaurant’s own former website (its “See this menu on In A Tub’s site” link points to http://in-a-tub.com/?page_id=65), and the wording is operator-typed rather than platform-generated. Asserts (descriptions only, no prices): Tacos “try our famous deep fried tacos. all tacos come with lettuce, sauce & powered cheese”; Tostados “a flat corn shell fried and topped w/ lettuce, sauce and powered cheese”; Tamales “get 2 locally made tamales per order”, Tamales Everything “chili, cheese, lettuce, sauce & onion”; Shakes And Malts, Sundaes, Tub Tornados and Cones flavour lists. Vintage caveat: undated and clearly pre-2016 (the in-a-tub.com site it came from was gone by then); used for descriptions only, never for the item set or prices. The underlying first-party PDF (in-a-tub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/inatubmenu-11.pdf) is unrecoverable — 404 at every Internet Archive capture attempt from 2016 onward, with no surviving copy of its contents. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸