Four Seasons Pizza & Pasta: Real Italians making real pizza

After studying at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for several years in the 1990s, Giulio Covello returned to his hometown in Sicily, Carini – a city of 40,000 residents not far from Palermo – but found that he was homesick for Kansas City.

“There were certain things that I had gotten used to here and things I really missed,” says Covello, who later moved back to the United States to work at one of his uncle’s restaurants, Original Pizza, in Johnson County. Last March, Covello decided to open his own pizzeria, taking over the lease at 7820 Quivira, formerly occupied by Nick’s Italian Pizza. One of the reasons that the 43-year-old Covello liked the brightly lit storefront space in a Lenexa strip center was that some of the pizza equipment came with the deal. Covello gave his friend Marino Moccia, 44, a small percentage of the restaurant to help him run the operation. Moccia is a native of Bari, Italy.

Next month, Covella’s restaurant turns a year old, and he’s still expanding the menu, testing new dishes as nightly specials (last weekend he offered a plate of chicken parmigiano with pasta, salad, garlic toast and a beverage, for $11.95) and pushing his signature dish: the thicker, more doughy Sicilian pizza, Sfincione (focaccia with toppings) that few other local pizzerias offer.

There’s nothing fancy about Four Seasons Pizza & Pasta. Customers order at the counter, which doubles as a display case for many of the restaurant’s pizza slices (which go back into the oven once they’re ordered), and a glass-enclosed “salad bar,” where patrons can direct one of the employees to prepare the salad for them.

This past Saturday night, the yellow-painted dining room was filled with boisterous children (the prices here are very modest) and a few couples nibbling on such Italian-American innovations as “pizza fries” (french fries with marinara sauce and cheese), fried mozzarella sticks and Buffalo chicken wings, as well as shrimp scampi, spaghetti and meatballs, and linguini in a house-made pesto.

“I serve both Neapolitan pizza – which is the thin-crust pizza that Americans call New York-style – and the Sicilian pizza that I grew up eating,” Covello says. “Different regions of Sicily have their own way of making this pizza, but it’s almost always thick and yeasty, like focaccia bread, and rectangular.” 

Covello also uses his thicker pizza dough to make a dessert. “I fill the pizza dough with a thick layer of Nutella and marshmallows, bake it and sprinkle the top of the pastry with chocolate syrup and powdered sugar.” The dish’s name? The Four Seasons, of course.