Spin’s Gail Lozoff and her partners have plans for the Kabuki location

Gail and Richard Lozoff decided on sushi for their first date, back in 1985. They went to Kabuki Japanese Restaurant in Crown Center. Nearly three decades later, the Lozoffs and their two business partners – Ed Brownell and Michael Kramer – are about to put a Spin Neapolitan Pizza restaurant in the former Kabuki location, on the first floor of the Crown Center complex.

The 100-seat restaurant is scheduled to open in September. Gail Lozoff says the partners are completely gutting Kabuki, and construction is to begin soon. The restaurant’s design is being overseen by Tracy Stern of 360 Architecture, which has designed all of the Spin locations since the Lozoffs opened the first of the pizzerias, in 2005.
Lozoff is the daughter of the late Sam Pasternak, who operated, with his father, Ben, the iconic Cake Box bakery. That local pastry chain was in business from 1946 through 1980. As a 5-year-old, Gail Pasternak was paid a penny for each cardboard cake box she assembled for the family business. At the chain’s height, it included 35 locations, including shops within the Milgram supermarkets. “I asked my father many times what happened to the Cake Box,” Gail Lozoff says. “He told me that the industry was changing dramatically, and they couldn’t keep up with the changes.”

That lesson was never lost on Lozoff, who says the pizza business is more competitive than ever.

“You really have to keep on your toes all the time,” she says. “You have to know what people are doing in the industry, know your own business, and be confident that you know what makes you good. It’s wonderful to have loyal customers, but you need to be aware of shifting changes in taste.”

Lozoff’s lessons have come from experiences beyond Cake Box. In 1988, she and her husband founded Einstein Bros Bagels. (They sold their shares in the company 13 years later.)

Returning to Kansas City from school in 1972 (she studied English at what was then Beaver College, in Pennsylvania), Lozoff was entranced by the early incarnation of Crown Center. “In those days, it featured a lot of local artists and small boutiques in a setting that was called the West Village,” she says. “A lot of my friends were artists, so I spent a lot of time at Crown Center.”

Over the years, the shopping and entertainment complex has had many changes in personality and tenants. Lozoff says its current makeup – with an expanded Halls store, the new Legoland Discovery Center and Sea Life Aquarium – fits Spin’s demographics.

“I have a lot of friends who work or live in the Crossroads, and they’re very excited about the changes happening in Crown Center. We wanted to be part of that evolution, and when Crown Center called us to look at the Kabuki space, it seemed like a really interesting opportunity.

“The finished restaurant will be a really inviting space,” Lozoff adds. We’ll have an outdoor patio and extend our dining area into the atrium. We also project a solid carryout business from hotel guests and the workers in the office buildings around the Crown Center complex.”

The Crown Center outpost is the first of three new Spin restaurants scheduled to open in the next year. A full-service restaurant opens this autumn on the campus of the University of Central Missouri, in Warrensburg, and a location at Overland Park’s Corbin Park shopping center is set for mid-2015