Il Lazzarone opens in the River Market

Erik Borger has a crash pad. And when he’s there, he seriously crashes.

The chef-owner of St. Joseph’s Il Lazzarone pizzeria has been putting in long days and long nights renovating the storefront at 412 Delaware (the former Cup and Saucer) for its March 14 grand opening as the second location of Il Lazzarone.

“I couldn’t make the drive back to St. Joseph after working until 3 or 4 in the morning,” Borger says. So he rented a small apartment a short walk from Il Lazzarone. “I mean small — it’s, like, 200 square feet, and just around the corner from the restaurant.”

You wouldn’t do more than sleep anyway if you were, say, working until 3 a.m. to redo bar floors. Borger, along with general manager Josh Young and other staff members have been working alongside the construction staff to perfect the space. For this ambitious, larger spot, with its separate barroom, Borger has hand-scorched red-oak planks in the style of shou sugi ban to give the surface a mottled, slightly charred effect that echoes his pies. He doesn’t want Il Lazzarone — the space or the food — to resemble any other pizzeria in the city.

A walk through the 3,100-square-foot Delaware Street storefront ahead of its opening shows that he has succeeded. The handmade chairs are constructed of rebar and short lengths of reclaimed wood, and the walls that aren’t of exposed brick are paneled in old barn wood, some of which dates back, Borger says, to the 19th century.

His pizza’s uniqueness is already a matter of record. Borger makes a delicious and authentic Margherita, with San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella, extra-virgin olive oil and fresh basil, all of it enriched further by the white oak that the pies are cooked over. As in St. Joseph, the oven is a Naples-manufactured Acunto Mario Forni, though the one here is twice as large as its older brother. It yields, as I wrote last year, when I ate at the original restaurant, “a perfect crust: light, slightly crisp, delicately charred, puffy from the yeast, intoxicatingly fragrant.”

The St. Joseph pizzeria is the only restaurant in Missouri to be certified as authentically Neapolitan by the American Delegation of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. (No Kansas pizzeria carries that endorsement.) Once again, Borger is applying for that locally rare imprimatur.

Meanwhile, he plans to offer a more varied menu in the Kansas City restaurant, including charcuterie, more salads (the fritto insalata tosses together lightly fried pizza dough with arugula, cherry tomatoes and fresh mozzarella in a balsamic glaze), and more vegetarian options. “You can hardly even say the word vegetarian in St. Joseph,” Borger says. Among the pizza additions: a carne pie, with pepperoni, sausage and salami; the pesto, with house-made basil pesto; and the funghi, a meatless option with mozzarella, extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, basil, sea salt and mushrooms.

“We’re also making our own fresh mozzarella now,” Borger says. “It’s a real labor of love, but it’s the kind of quality we want in our product.”

He’s never going to love soft drinks, but Borger has lifted his ban on them for the Kansas City Il Lazzarone. “We had to have them for the bar,” he says with a sigh. “Mexican Coke and flavored San Pellegrino, and we’re going to create our own soda syrups in-house so we can serve our own craft soda beverages.”

Il Lazzarone’s bar program looks promising. Borger has hired Dominic Petrucci, formerly of Julep, to be head bartender, and the staff also includes certified cicerone Jacob Adolphson. Il Lazzarone’s bar will boast 50 taps for craft beer.

Of course, you might just want to wash your certified-authentic pizza down with an icy Coke. “If that’s what people want,” Borger says, “that’s what we’ll give them.”

He may simply be too tired to object. Opening day’s arrival doesn’t mean that Borger is done with late-night crashing. “I plan to be here, night and day, for at least the first three months,” he says.