Four Seasons makes Sicilian pizza fit in Lenexa

I don’t know what happened to the Samurai Club. I can’t tell you the fate of the scrapbooking shop, either — or any of the other businesses now absent from Quivira Square, the forlorn suburban strip at 78th Street and Quivira. But there’s one bright spot among these empty Lenexa storefronts: Four Seasons Pizza & Pasta.

Operated by Italians Giulio Covello, from Sicily, and Marino Moccia, from Bari, the restaurant is almost ridiculously casual, and the prices are correspondingly cheap. With its limited menu and counter service, it’s also not the kind of spot that typically calls for a review. And yet, it’s such an unexpected find in this otherwise soulless enclave of chain and fast-food restaurants that it deserves attention simply for surviving in an inhospitable atmosphere. Unlike the undistinguished pizza joint that preceded Four Seasons in this location, Covello and Moccia’s restaurant gets to celebrate a first anniversary this month.

Covello credits Four Seasons’ success to the East Coast transplants who live in the metro. “Our marketing is all word-of-mouth,” he told me recently, his accent as thick as a slab of the yeasty Sicilian pizza he makes. “When people from the East Coast hear that we have New York–style pizza, they come in for a slice of pizza and then stay to have our lasagna, our stromboli, our salads.”

According to Covello, the thin-crust pizza we think of as New York–style is, more accurately, Neapolitan, though not in the official sense. According to the rules of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (the 30-year-old Neapolitan-pizza trade group), a true Neapolitan pizza must be kneaded by hand and baked in an oak-fired oven at 905 degrees Fahrenheit. The oven at Covello’s restaurant is a gas model, but the staff does knead and toss the dough by hand.

When they’re not yanking hot pizza or lasagna en casserole from the white-hot ovens, the kitchen workers assemble salads to order (among the four are a Greek salad with triangles of puffy pita and an antipasto salad heavy on tart marinated giardiniera), requiring patrons to stand at the side of the tiled counter in the center of the dining room. There might be easier, less complicated ways to do this, but Four Seasons Pizza & Pasta is Covello’s venue, and if he wants the restaurant to have a touch of Fellini about the food and the service, so be it.

On my first visit to the restaurant, some of that stubborn charm was lost on me — but not on my dining companion, who was spellbound by Covella’s long-range plans. For one thing, he means to add live performances. There’s a raised platform in the front corner of the yellow-painted room for, say, an accordion player, a small combo, or even Roman-style karaoke for wannabe Jovanottis or Renato Zeros.

The pasta dishes include a very tasty, meaty, Sicilian-inspired lasagna (made with béchamel sauce rather than with ricotta) and a fresh-tasting (but too oily) pesto linguine. I’m not the biggest fan of shrimp scampi in any incarnation, but it’s a big seller here — “Everyone loves it,” Moccia said, guilt-tripping me into ordering it — and it’s good. The butter sauce, intoxicatingly heavy on the garlic and the lemon juice, makes an excellent pizza dipping sauce, too.

It’s probably wiser to custom-design a pizza from the available ingredients than to settle on one of the six ho-hum “specialty” pies. The two meatless variations are unmemorable, with the “white spinach” affair — with ricotta, mozzarella and parmigiano — sodium-heavy and flavor-light.

The thick-crust Sicilian is the main pizza event here. The style isn’t easy to find around the metro (a scarcity it shares with Chicago deep dish, which is an otherwise significantly different pizza), and you want it to be good when you can finally order it. The version at Four Seasons resembles heavily encrusted focaccia, gorgeously bread-y and nearly as good cold the next morning as it is fresh from the oven.

Not everything on the Four Seasons menu is native to Covello and Moccia’s homeland. There’s a pizza roll with barbecue brisket, as well as three kinds of gyro sandwiches and a Philly cheesesteak (made with a choice of provolone, Swiss, American or mozzarella, but no Cheez Whiz).

The house-made tiramisu on the dessert list is fluffy and delicious but alcohol-free. When Covello gets his liquor license, he plans to continue offering it boozeless, alongside a potent version of the Sienese trifle. “I’d like to make a version,” he says, “with Grand Marnier.”

The cheesecake is imported from a local bakery, but this restaurant’s signature dessert is called the Four Seasons. Covello bakes pizza dough, fills it with Nutella and marshmallows, dusts the crispy circle with powdered sugar, then drizzles it with chocolate syrup. I can’t vouch for its authenticity (I’ve never seen anything quite like it in Rome or Florence), but it’s a grande successo in Lenexa. And for the entrepreneurs at Four Seasons, that’s good enough.