Colby & Megan Garrelts

Colby and Megan Garrelts are the husband-and-wife chef team behind Kansas City’s Bluestem and Rye. Colby won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest in 2013, and Megan, a pastry chef, has been a repeated Beard semifinalist for her pastry work.

Biography

The Garreltses opened Bluestem in Kansas City’s Westport neighborhood, at 900 Westport Road, in 2004 and ran it until 2020.¹ Colby was nominated for a James Beard Award seven times before winning Best Chef: Midwest on May 6, 2013 — in his acceptance speech he gestured to Megan and said, “She’s more the reason I’m up here than I am.”¹ Megan Garrelts has earned Outstanding Pastry Chef semifinalist recognition for her work at Bluestem and later at Rye.¹

After closing Bluestem, the couple focused on Rye, their Midwestern comfort-food restaurant, which grew to two locations — Rye Leawood at Mission Farms (10551 Mission Road, Leawood, Kansas), the first, opened in 2012, and Rye Plaza on the Country Club Plaza (4646 Mill Creek Parkway).² Both are open, with Colby and Megan listed as executive chefs and proprietors.² Together they also co-authored the cookbooks Bluestem: The Cookbook (with Bonjwing Lee) and Made in America: A Modern Collection of Classic Recipes.³

Legacy

The Garreltses are among the chefs who earned Kansas City sustained national culinary recognition, pairing fine-dining ambition (Bluestem) with an embrace of regional comfort cooking (Rye).

See also

• rye

Sources

Citations replaced 2026-09-08. This page previously cited Feast Magazine and a Visit KC listing without URLs. All Feast URLs return HTTP 429 (Lee Enterprises) and the Bluestem-era ones have no Internet Archive capture, so they cannot ship under the Iron Rule. The claims they carried are either re-sourced to The Pitch or flagged in the body. The restaurant’s own site, bluestemkc.com, no longer resolves (checked 2026-09-08).

Footnotes

1. Jonathan Bender, “Colby Garrelts named the James Beard Awards’ Best Chef: Midwest,” The Pitch, May 7, 2013 — “Garrelts, the co-owner of Bluestem and Rye who has been nominated for a James Beard Award seven times, was named the JBA’s Best Chef: Midwest Monday night”; Colby’s acceptance speech crediting Megan, “pastry chef and co-owner.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. “About,” Rye — “Since opening its first location in 2012, Rye has become a beloved staple of the Kansas City dining scene”; “Colby & Megan Garrelts - Executive Chefs / Proprietors”; “Founded by husband-and-wife team Colby and Megan Garrelts, Rye brings chef-driven comfort food to the table.” Location addresses from the site’s home page, ryekc.com: Rye Leawood, 10551 Mission Road, Leawood, KS 66206, in Mission Farms; Rye Plaza, 4646 Mill Creek Parkway, Kansas City, MO 64112, on the Country Club Plaza. ↩ ↩²

3. Bluestem: The Cookbook (Colby Garrelts, Megan Garrelts, with Bonjwing Lee), Andrews McMeel — ISBN 9781449400613, publisher record at (the publisher page returns HTTP 403 to automated retrieval; the ISBN is the durable pointer). Made in America: A Modern Collection of Classic Recipes (Colby Garrelts, Megan Garrelts), Andrews McMeel — ISBN 9781449430863. ↩