His pizza nights were so popular at this Kansas City dive bar, he opened a pizzeria
You could say it has been a three-year soft opening for Fortunati.
Owner Justin Norcross started cooking pizzas during the pandemic. He bought a Gozney Dome pizza oven and would drop off pies on the doorsteps of family and friends. Then he introduced a semi-weekly pizza night at Lucky Boys, the West Bottoms bar Norcross co-owns with Dan Myers and Keenan Nichols.
“I had always sworn we’d never do pizzas at Lucky Boys,” said Norcross, who oversaw the bar’s menu when it opened in 2015. “Everyone has an opinion about pizza, and I didn’t want to open myself up to all that.”
But before long, the bar was moving 80-100 pizzas every Tuesday and Thursday night, and Norcross found himself thinking more about branching out into delivery and carryout. Lucky Boys wasn’t big enough for that kind of an operation, though. So he rented a vacant space a couple doors south of the bar, at 1623 Genessee St., that he’s spent the last several months converting into a pizzeria.
Fortunati — it’s Italian for “lucky,” a nod to his bar down the street — opened officially on Wednesday.
“I’m trying to marry what I like about New York-style pizza with more Neapolitan influences,” Norcross said. “The fact that Kansas City doesn’t really have a pizza identity, I feel like it gives me license to try a lot of things.”
Norcross is a bread head. Before Lucky Boys, he worked a stint at Farm to Market Bread Co. and “really fell in love with the process of baking bread and working with dough.” At Fortunati, he’s using flour from his West Bottoms neighbors at Marion Milling and a 1950s German mixer he snagged from the beloved and bygone West Side bakery Fervere.
“We’re using heavier, high-protein flour — a more intense kind of dough,” Norcross said. “The idea is to have a crust ring that’s more like a French baguette, or European traditional bread.”
Helping out Norcross in the kitchen at Fortunati is Brian Sonnich, formerly of The Town Company and Lidia’s. Specialty pizzas include the Spicy Sausage (vodka sauce, mozzarella, sausage, pickled hot peppers and basil) and the Mortadella Bianco (pecorino cream sauce, mortadella, potato and arugula). They’re still waiting on their liquor license but plan to eventually serve alcohol at Fortunati as well.
The space, formerly occupied by the Filipino restaurant KC Pinoy, is set up like a New York slice joint, with just a handful of tables and some high-top seating along the walls. Those walls are bare for now, save for a pizza-themed abstract mural by local artist Jacob Schildtknecht. Norcross said they’ll be rounding out the restaurant’s design aesthetic in the coming weeks.
There are also plans for a patio on the roomy gravel lot that lies between Fortunati and Voltaire, its neighbor to the north.
“The sexiest part of pizza-making is watching the process, so once we have the patio up and going, the plan is to bring an oven outside and cook the pizzas out there on certain nights,” Norcross said.
Hours for now are 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday. For Norcross, it’s been an adjustment, swapping a barman’s schedule for a baker’s.
“At Lucky Boys, I’d been used to getting home at 4 a.m.,” he said. “Now, that’s about when I get up to go to work in the morning.”
Fortunati Pizza. 1623 Genessee. 816-469-5000.
This story was originally published July 13, 2023 at 11:23 AM.
