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.