New Kansas City pizza shop serves slices for little dough: ‘Everyone can come there’
Try to count all the zany knickknacks inside Northeast Pizza.
An empty birdcage. Legos stuffed inside the cracks of its brick walls. A giant Gumby blow-up tangled in lights, hanging from the ceiling. The space has an eclectic style like one might find at a DIY music venue.
The punk rock music playing over the speakers is a bigger hint that pizza shop owners Max Popoff and Noah Quillec are involved in the music scene. Popoff owns music bar Farewell at 6515 Stadium Drive, which Quillec helped him open.
The music-loving duo partnered with Mike DeStefano, — executive chef at fine-dining Johnson County restaurant Verbena — to bring the Northeast fresh, affordable pizza.
Northeast Pizza opened at 2203 Lexington Ave. about a week ago, and they’re already making friends in the neighborhood.
“Over half our customers are repeat customers,” Quillec said.
The community aspect is one the main reasons why Quillec wanted to open the pizza shop. He lives down the street and has loved his neighborhood since he arrived in 2018. He’s long wanted to do something for the area, and he recognizes that some people there need quality, affordable places to eat.
The restaurant sells large, single slices of pizza (cheese is $3.25 and pepperoni is $3.75).
“We like making pizza, and we like the Northeast,” Quillec said. “We want to provide a really good, consistent product for the Northeast and make it something where everyone can come there and enjoy pizza.”
Its 16-inch pizza options include: the Pendleton Heights hot pepperoni (mozzarella, red sauce, fresh basil and olive oil) for $22 and the Northeast supreme (mozzarella, red sauce, pepperoni, sausage, mushroom, bell peppers and roasted onion) for $24. A cheese pizza is $16.50.
A caesar salad is $7, and a cucumber and tomato salad is $5.
Chef DeStefano is trained to serve upscale food, though he’s always had a special passion for pizza. And Quillec is no stranger to the food industry either — his family owns Prairie Village’s Cafe Provence and French Market.
To set their pizza apart, they use fermented dough in all of their pies.
“It’s a very detailed thing, and we pay a lot of attention to that, our crust being perfect and our dough being perfect,” he said. “We like to be really consistent, simple and straightforward.”
Quillec and his team gathered antiques and all sorts of “vintage stuff” to give the space the “DIY spirit,” as he put it.
Already, they’ve seen their shop fulfill a need in the neighborhood.
“Everyone’s just been clamoring for some sort of restaurant, something to do in the evenings,” he said. “Pizza — this kind of niche of it — it was kind of missing.”
Northeast Pizza is open 3 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays; and 3 to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. It’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
