Step inside classic KC area burger joint that hosted Mahomes, Reid, Jake from State Farm

In June, Larry Comer bumped into a gentleman outside the HiBoy burger joint he owns on Gudgell Road in Independence. The man said that he was a producer and that he had a meeting scheduled with the owner. Comer informed him that he was talking to the owner, but he didn’t have any meetings like that on his schedule.

“He said, ‘No, you know, for the commercial,’” Comer recalled. “I said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong place.’ Then he said it was about the State Farm commercial with Pat Mahomes they wanted to shoot there. I said, ‘OK, you got my attention.’”

There are three HiBoy locations, all in Independence. Comer owns two — the one at 16721 E. Gudgell and another at 924 W. U.S. 24 Highway. The third, at 3424 Blue Ridge Cutoff, is owned by Jim Messick. Turns out, the producer had called Messick thinking he owned the Gudgell location.

They eventually got it sorted out. A week later, a large film crew descended on Comer’s restaurant, which he closed for the day. The Kansas City Chiefs quarterback, along with head coach Andy Reid and actor Kevin Miles (better known as Jake from State Farm) shot a scene in a booth where Jake attempts to explain home and auto insurance bundling to a hungry Reid using a combo meal metaphor, cheeseburger and fries. The commercial debuted during the Chiefs’ season opener Sept. 7 against the Detroit Lions.

It is an ad for State Farm, not HiBoy. The HiBoy name and logo are nowhere to be seen, and the interior is shot to make it look like a generic fast-food restaurant. But out in Independence, where HiBoy is every bit the dining institution Winstead’s or Town Topic are in Kansas City, it’s no mystery where the commercial was filmed.

“We’ve been having people stop by every day to ask about it,” Comer said. “People in Independence, they recognize the lobby, the red-and-navy booths, the framed photos on the wall. I mean, Jim and I’s restaurants, we have customers who’ve been coming in every week — some of them every day — for 20, 30, 40 years.”

It’s been that way since 1957. That’s when Floyd Kleiber opened a walk-up burger stand at the corner of U.S. 40 and Blue Ridge Cutoff. Don’t confuse it with Big Boy — there’s no relation. “Everything was something-or-other ‘Boy’ back then,” Comer said.

Jerry Mackey bought it from Kleiber a few years later and expanded HiBoy into a chain that at its height included five Independence locations. (Mackey would later gain attention as part of the local group that, in 1987, discovered the sunken Steamboat Arabia. He even preserved some of the cargo in HiBoy’s commercial freezers.)

Both current owners have been working at HiBoy since they were in high school — since 1974 for Comer, who is 66, and 1982 for Messick, who’s 57. They both met their wives at HiBoy. They have cousins and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law who met their spouses while working at HiBoy. Comer’s mother-in-law, Joyce, still helps out with the accounting part time. The woman is 86 years old.

“The world has changed,” Messick said, “but HiBoy has changed barely at all.”

Employees — like assistant manager Angie Paprocki, who’s been at HiBoy since 1995 and told The Star she plans to work there “forever” — still take down customer orders on handwritten slips and post them to the ticket wheel. They take credit cards, but there’s no computer systems to be found. They do the books by hand.

Then there’s the food. The sauces — ketchup sauce, tartar sauce, HiBoy sauce (which is a blend of ketchup and Miracle Whip) — are all made by hand. “It’s the exact same recipes I was taught 40 years ago,” Messick said.

The onion rings are a crowd favorite, as are the hand-blended Cyclones — HiBoy’s version of a concrete.

“Back in the day, it was just strawberry, chocolate and vanilla,” Messick said. “Now, we got probably 20 flavors and toppings you can mix in. We sell a lot of ice cream.”

The lean 90/10% meat for the burgers comes from L&C Meat, an Independence butcher that dates back to 1948. (HiBoy has been using the company since the 1970s, Comer said.) They serve what these days are called smashburgers: loosely packed beef, smashed thin onto the grill, often spilling over the sides of the buns they’re served on.

“The pepper’s ground into the meat ahead of time, and we just salt it and cook it to order,” Comer said. “We don’t pre-cook anything. Everything’s fresh.”

“I hear all the time from customers that their double cheeseburger tastes the same as it did 40 years ago,” Messick said. “Whether they live in the neighborhood and stop by regularly or have moved away and come back over Thanksgiving, I hear it constantly.”

Comer and Messick had only kind words for Patrick Mahomes, Reid and the crew. Reid drove himself to the shoot, he said, and Mahomes stuck around to sign jerseys and shirts. (“He was very polite, even at the end of a long day,” Comer said.)

The director let Comer’s granddaughter sit in his chair and yell “Action.” They said they were told that the producers of the State Farm commercial scouted two other restaurants in the Kansas City area before landing on the Gudgell Road HiBoy.

“But we signed some papers,” Comer said. “We can only say so much. I was a little surprised they wouldn’t just do it at a Whataburger” — the chain is a Mahomes favorite and he’s a franchisee. “Then somebody pointed out that they’re all orange, and our colors are red, like State Farm and the Chiefs.”

HiBoy does have a different longtime sports affiliation: It is well known around Independence for sponsoring youth baseball teams; a young Albert Pujols played on a HiBoy-sponsored team in the American Legion in the late 1990s. Messick, who’s owned the walk-up location on Blue Ridge Cutoff since 1997, has two sons in college — one plays baseball at Missouri Western, the other on a club team at Mizzou. He said once they graduate, the plan is for the three of them to coach some HiBoy teams together. He said he has no plans to sell his store.

“It’s the only job I’ve ever had,” he said, “41 years now.”

Comer bought the store on U.S. 24 from Mackey in 1991, then opened the Gudgell location where the commercial was filmed in 2000. (It used to be a KFC.) He said his son, currently a manager, will take over his stores when he retires.

“When I opened this second HiBoy, people said, ‘Are you nervous to open up next to a McDonald’s and a Hardee’s?” Comer said. “But I never had a second thought about it. HiBoy is a community kind of place, always has been. And people in Independence, they’re loyal.”