Limestone Pizza Kitchen Bar

The Restaurant

Limestone Pizza Kitchen Bar occupies a heritage two-story building at 814 Massachusetts Street in Lawrence's Downtown Historic District — a block from 715 across the seven-and-eight-hundred-block Mass Street walking grid and a five-minute walk from the working University of Kansas campus — and has held the seat as the city's reference downtown Neapolitan-pizza house since opening. The dining room runs about ninety covers across a long two-story parlor with original brick along the long wall, a working wood-fired pizza-oven at the back of the room that anchors the kitchen, a careful craft-beer-and-wine bar at the front of the house, and a heritage Lawrence-downtown-historic-district atmosphere that reads as a working Massachusetts Street institution rather than a chain pizzeria. The conversion preserved the building's original two-story scale and the careful brick-and-timber palette runs through every corner of the room.

The kitchen runs the wood-fired Neapolitan-pizza format the way the format ought to be run: a working hand-thrown pizza programme as the standing centre, a careful small-plate antipasti opening card that runs alongside the working pizza-oven, a working entree-pasta card for the table that does not commit to a pie, and a small dessert programme that closes every dinner service. Signature pies include a working margherita built on a hand-pulled mozzarella base, a careful spicy-soppressata-and-honey programme, a working seasonal pie that rotates with the local growing calendar, and a careful Lawrence-original card that pays attention to the working Kansas-Missouri farmer-and-producer supply network. The bar pours a working craft-beer programme — about thirty taps with deliberate Midwest and Kansas-City-brewery depth — and a careful chosen-wine card.

Service is the older school of working-Italian-pizzeria hospitality — career servers, the kitchen visible from every corner of the room, a working family-friendly weekend afternoon programme that runs from Friday lunch through Sunday close, and a pace that treats a sixty-to-ninety-minute dinner as the format rather than the exception. The eight-hundred-block Mass Street address means the room draws from the campus set, the downtown-business set and the visiting-Kansas-River-City weekend set in equal measure. For a Lawrence evening that needs to register as a real working Neapolitan-pizza-and-craft-bar room rather than a campus chain, Limestone is the standing eight-hundred-block answer.