Thomas DeVillers
The transformation of 101 King: remarkable.
The team behind the downtown craft cocktail bar Merchant is putting the final touches on new sister restaurant Lucille. The contemporary-styled pizza tavern, 101 King St., is set to open on May 12. It will serve lunch and dinner seven days a week. After 10 p.m., the restaurant will have a late-night menu and feature DJs.
Lucille sits at the entryway to the growing nightlife district east of the Capitol Square. The corner building where King Street meets Main and Pinckney (and the former home of Isthmus) has been stripped back to the original brick walls. Floor-to-ceiling windows have been installed along the Pinckney Street side. The NanaWall windows can be folded back, opening the restaurant up to the outdoors and downtown streets.
Merchant co-owners Joshua Berkson and Patrick Sweeney will run Lucille with managing partners Tom Dufek and Maddy Van Elzen, both veterans of Merchant.
Lucille will be defined by a farm-to-table pizza menu. A wood-fired oven is placed prominently in the space and built on a base of repurposed bricks removed during remodeling of the 1920s-era building.
Lucille’s pizzaiolo (master pizza maker) Chris Gragg says he’s created a hybrid between Neapolitan- and American-style pizza for the restaurant. Each pie needs only two minutes in the wood-powered oven because of the intense heat. “Every good oven deserves a name; hers is Emmy Lou,” says Gragg of the specially built kiln.
Thomas DeVillers
The restaurant is Lucille; the oven is named Emmy Lou.
In addition to wood-fired pizza, Lucille will also offer a thicker, steel-pan pizza that can be customized with a more diverse selection of toppings, all locally sourced, says Gragg. This pie is a take on deep-dish, Detroit-style pizza originally baked in heavy steel pans used to catch motor oil. “It’s like cooking in a cast-iron skillet. That gets you a nice, crunchy crust and a soft, airy interior,” says Gragg.
The dough for Lucille’s pizza will ferment for 36 hours. A dough room has been built in the lower floor of Lucille exclusively for this process. Instead of water, the steel-pan pizzas will be fermented with Spotted Cow beer.
The main floor of Lucille will have casual seating with long communal tables that can be taken apart to create smaller sections. Sweeney says to-go slices will be sold from a takeout counter that will have an outdoor window: “It’ll be like a food cart where you can order right from the street.”
An 18-seat pewter bar is at the center of the room and shaped to match the lines of the triangular building. Lucille will serve craft cocktails. In addition, 25 taps will feature a rotating cast of mainly Wisconsin-made brews.
“The first floor will have an old-school Wisconsin tavern vibe where it'll be easy to meet up with people,” says Berkson.
The second floor will seat over 100 and have more formal sit-down restaurant service. The upper level, a triangle-shaped balcony of sorts, will allow diners to see all the action below. Large, half-circle “gangster booths” line the back wall of the upper level. The tip of the triangle features French doors that can open in good weather, providing an unobstructed view of the Capitol.
“We really opened up the building to let in the natural light, “says Berkson. “Now you can see the whole neighborhood.”
The basement has been remodeled into a lounge with its own bar that will serve classic cocktails. A large bank vault in the lower floor — installed by a prior tenant, Capital City Bank — has been fitted with a banquette bench that wraps around three sides of the vault.
“We had a helluva time cutting a window into the vault,” says Sweeney. “There are steel bars embedded in the concrete walls that are two feet thick.”
The building does not have an elevator, so the basement lounge and second floor are accessible only via stairs.
Sweeney sees the pizzeria as a “gateway” to the King Street entertainment district, which carries a responsibility to the neighborhood: “The camaraderie between King Street area business owners is like nothing I’ve experienced,” he says. “When they thrive, we thrive, so we have to live up to that.”
