Culinaria Mediterranean Kitchen

The Restaurant

Culinaria Mediterranean Kitchen occupies one of East Lawrence's most historic buildings at 512 East Ninth Street, Suite A, on the northwest corner of Ninth and New Jersey, a five-block walk from the seven-hundred block of Massachusetts Street and an easy approach from any downtown hotel, and has held the seat as the city's reference East-Lawrence small-plates room since opening as a brick-and-mortar restaurant in autumn 2017. The building itself was originally constructed for the Kansas Cavalry after William Quantrill's August 1863 raid on Lawrence, the building's working nineteenth-century military-stable architecture is preserved through the original exposed-brick walls, the heavy-timber ceiling beams and a careful courtyard-and-patio programme that opens through the warm-weather months. The dining room runs about sixty covers across a single careful parlor with original brick along three walls, a working open kitchen behind a glass pass at the rear, and a low-light scheme that reads as a working eastern-Mediterranean meyhane rather than a Kansas-college-town chain.

Owners Aaron Pillar and Regan Lehman Pillar ran Culinaria as a working Lawrence catering company from 2009 onward, before transforming the operation into a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the autumn of 2017. The kitchen runs the made-from-scratch eastern-Mediterranean tapas-size small-plates format the way the format ought to be run: a working mezze opening card as the standing centre, house-made hummus, smoky baba ghanoush, careful labneh-and-olive presentations, a working flatbread programme run from the open kitchen, a careful charcuterie-and-cheese opening card, a working seasonal entree programme that draws from a Kansas-Missouri farmer-and-producer network and a small dessert programme that closes every working dinner service. The wine card runs to about a hundred and twenty labels with deliberate Greek, Lebanese, Spanish and South-of-France depth, and a careful cocktail bar pours classics-and-craft through the evening.

Service is the older school of eastern-Mediterranean small-plates hospitality, career servers, the owners frequently in the front-of-house on weekend evenings, working live music on select Sunday brunch services, and a pace that treats a two-hour evening of sharing as the format rather than the exception. The patio courtyard reads as one of the city's most romantic outdoor-dining addresses on a summer evening. The East-Lawrence Ninth-and-New-Jersey address is far enough from the working Mass Street weekend grid to read as a destination, but close enough that a downtown hotel set can walk in. For a Lawrence evening that needs to register as a real working eastern-Mediterranean small-plates format rather than a campus chain operation, Culinaria is the standing East-Lawrence answer.