After several months of redeveloping a former auto garage in downtown Olathe, Pizza 51’s newest location opens to the public there on Wednesday.
Owners Jason and Shannon Pryor, the husband-and-wife team behind the vision for the new pizzeria, will soon join a flurry of other new businesses as the downtown core undergoes a renaissance.
Pizza 51 is opening at 200 S. Kansas Ave.
- The pizzeria took over a space just off Kansas Avenue and Loula Street.
- There, the restaurant is near recently-opened Bikes for the Likes of Us and the future sites of Hermetheus Coffee and Third Street Social.
- Pizza 51’s regular hours in Olathe will be 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Pizza 51 serves “hand-tossed” pizza and other eats
The Olathe spot will serve the “stone-baked” pizzas that its Kansas City customers know the restaurant for.
Some of the specialty pizzas on the restaurant’s menu include the “Highway Special” (with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, green peppers, onions and black olives) and the “Veggie Delight” (black olives, mushrooms, broccoli, green peppers and spinach).
In addition to pizza, the restaurant serves a variety of other items like sandwiches, calzones, salads, and appetizers like breadsticks and wings.
Though the Olathe location will start off with a limited menu initially, it will eventually expand with some new sandwich and topping options. Pryor said the larger size of kitchen at the Olathe location presented the opportunity for this.
“Almost everything about this place is double what the original was,” he said. “Two ovens, two throwing stations, twice the square footage, double the seating.”
From gas stations and garages
For the Pryors, it started with an old gas station across state lines in 2004.
Jason Pryor drove past the Kansas City, Missouri, space and said he immediately saw the potential for what it could be. So he and his wife, Shannon Pryor, set out to transform it into what it is today: a pizzeria.
More than 20 years after opening Pizza 51’s flagship location, the husband-and-wife team got the opportunity to do the same thing across the state line.
After acquiring the former two-car auto garage in downtown Olathe, the owners of Pizza 51 got to work giving the building the Pizza 51 “flair.” A third garage bay with new seating was added to the south of the building, and a kitchen was added to the east side.
Through openings in the wall where the auto shop formerly ended, customers can watch as their pizzas are tossed and prepared in the kitchen.
Even with the new flairs, though, Pryor said they still wanted to preserve the history of the building. The walls are adorned with mementos and black-and-white photos of the Olathe auto garage.
“We wanted to stay true to (our history of) serving pizza out of a garage, yet bring it into 2025,” he said. “You can see that we wanted to respect the past, yet add a little flair.”
This is a Johnson County comeback for Pizza 51
In 2011, Pizza 51 expanded to Johnson County for the first time, moving into another former gas station in Fairway.
That location, dubbed Pizza 51 West, was open for roughly seven years before it closed at the beginning of 2019.
Its return to Johnson County and its debut in Olathe marks the first in a surge of new restaurants planned for downtown, as part of the city’s ongoing efforts to redevelop the area.
Kansas City, Missouri-based eateries Third Street Social and Char Bar plan to follow later this year, along with local bar and grill Austins.
Pryor said he and the restaurant’s co-owners are looking forward to being the “pioneers” of this new phase of growth for the downtown restaurant scene.
“It’s exciting to be the first to take advantage of the opportunity and serve a market that just hadn’t had many options,” he said. “We had the opportunity to be a part of something special in the rebuilding of downtown.”
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