Spin Neapolitan Pizza opens Crown Center location on Thursday

The seventh Spin Neapolitan Pizza location in the Kansas City metro officially opens tomorrow in the Crown Center complex, taking over the former Kabuki restaurant space on the ground level. Earlier this week, the co-founders of the Kansas City-based pizzeria chain, Gail and Richard Lozoff, and newer partner Mike Kramer, were in the space overseeing the training of the serving staff and kitchen crew. (The restaurant is still hiring, Gail Lozoff says: “It’s been a little more difficult hiring staff for this location than we expected.”)

The 3,800-square-foot space has an indoor dining room that seats 125 and a still uncompleted patio that will seat 35 diners. Like the other Spin restaurants, the Crown Center venue is a fast-casual concept where patrons order at a counter and have food delivered to the table. The menu, Gail Lozoff says, is still overseen by chef-restaurateur Michael Smith, who introduced several small plates to the Spin restaurants last fall, including an oversized stuffed pork meatball, roasted eggplant parmigiana and a Calabrian shrimp formaggi that can be ordered as starters or, paired with salad or soup, a small meal.

When The Pitch spoke with Gail Lozoff last summer, she had hoped that the Crown Center location would be open by September 2014. 

The build-out in the former Kabuki space was more complicated; it features architectural details that the other locations don’t, including open-air windows that look out on the Crown Center’s soaring atrium (and can be rolled down when this communal space gets noisy), light fixtures made of bicycle wheels and a stone hearth pizza oven with a revolving deck.

The eighth Spin restaurant in the metro, in the Corbin Park complex at 135th Street and Nall, is scheduled to open next month. Gail Lozoff says she and her partners are currently scouting locations in the Northland for a ninth area restaurant.