Limestone Pizza in Lawrence blends Neapolitan style with prairie ingredients

When Lawrence chefs Rick Martin, Charlie Rascoll and Mikey Humphrey decided they wanted to open their own restaurant, they chose the location before the cuisine. The former La Parrilla space, at 814 Massachusetts, had been empty since that Latin American restaurant moved to 724 Massachusetts months earlier. Martin and his business partners liked the 19th-century building. What they found inside, less so.

“It was in pretty rough shape before we moved in,” Martin says. “But the location was a real sweet spot for downtown Lawrence. It’s the real pivot point for downtown activity. The building’s owners, George and Judy Paley, wanted a tenant that they knew could bring a successful operation into the space.”

Martin, Rascoll and Humphrey stand a good chance of fulfilling that mandate with Limestone Pizza Kitchen Bar, which they opened April 10 in a slick renovation of 814 Mass.

All three owners are intimately familiar with the workings of downtown Lawrence. Wichita native Martin, 42, worked at Free State Brewing Co. for two decades (he left to teach culinary students), and Rascoll was one of the founders of the iconic WheatFields Bakery. Humphrey, who oversees the pizzas at Limestone, was the longtime head baker at WheatFields.

Humphrey uses Kansas wheat flour to create what the partners call “Neoprairie” pizza: Neapolitan in style, Sunflower State in ingredients. The pies are fired in a 20,000-pound Le Panyol, a French-manufactured white-clay oven that runs on wood. (Humphrey uses Kansas hedge wood because it’s a renewable resource.) The oven is encased in Kansas limestone.

The restaurant’s menu is simple, dominated by six versions of 12-inch pizzas meant to change seasonally. Martin already has plans for a summer pizza of shredded zucchini and Gruyère. The recipes are light on tomato sauce, and the emphasis is on ingredient origin and quality rather than that usual pizza virtue: abundance.

“You can’t put too much on these pizzas,” Martin says, “or they get globby. The heat of our oven extracts a lot of flavor from fewer ingredients. We want to focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients.”

The single-page menu is heavy on house-made products, including tart sweet-sour pickles (potently spiced with garlic, allspice, clove and fresh dill) that are delicious folded into a feather-light slice of pizza. Among the other “Bar Bites” choices are hand-cut fries and house-made mozzarella, along with a startlingly fresh salad of micro greens with slices of fresh orange and grapefruit, chopped pistachios and nutty Taleggio cheese.

If you ask Martin about the first time he tasted pizza – any pizza – he chuckles. Pizza Hut started in Wichita, and Martin fondly recalls the red-checked tablecloths and draft beers of the popular chain. Limestone Pizza Kitchen Bar is light-years removed from Pizza Hut, but the space exudes an appealing, small-town casualness. (And that small menu finds room for burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and a hefty plate of ham and beans.)

“We plan to keep it as simple as we can, introducing a lot of specials as a way of testing new items for our menu and whatever the freshest produce we can obtain, from fresh corn to peaches to asparagus,” Martin says. “We want the pizza selection to evolve naturally.”

Even the staffing so far has a certain sense of organic evolution about it. Martin, a former culinary-arts instructor for nearby Eudora High School who continues to teach cooking classes for the Lawrence school district, has hired several students from the latter program to work with him at Limestone. A graduating senior is the restaurant’s pastry chef.

The 64-seat dining room serves food from 11 a.m. to midnight Monday through Saturday and from noon to 10 p.m. Sunday.