Flashback Friday: 1990s Old Town restaurant served pizza buffet at noon, blues at night
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant, Torre’s Pizzeria, served a popular pizza buffet in late 1990s Old Town.
If you worked in downtown Wichita in the late 1990s and early 2000s — or were a fan of live music during that time — you probably spent at least one lunch hour or night out at Torre’s (pronounced Torey’s) Pizzeria.
The restaurant, which opened at 131 N. Rock Island in February 1996, was owned by Cheri and Dan Gentzler — Kansas City Chiefs fans who would always stop at Torre’s Pizza in Kansas City’s Westport district when they traveled to football games. They decided to franchise the concept and bring it to Wichita.
At the time, the couple described their main product as “more of a gourmet pizza” that featured fresh ingredients and lots of toppings. Torre’s also offered something that was particularly popular at the time: a lunchtime pizza buffet, where diners could travel through a line and fill their plates at a salad bar and at a hot bar filled with different types of pasta and pizza. On opening day in 1996, the cost for the buffet was $4.55.
Torre’s also served stuffed pizzas, pastas and sandwiches, including a famous meatball sub. Among the popular specialty pizzas it offered was a seafood pizza topped with crab meat and shrimp. Torre’s would deliver to nearby addresses and also sold whole pizza pies. The bar offered domestic and imported beers.
Gentzler, who’d owned a construction company, did most of the interior remodeling himself and made the restaurant, which had been a warehouse in its previous life, a comfortable dining destination. It featured wooden booths with brass accents and exposed brick walls.
The food was a hit, especially with downtown workers, who liked to walk to Torre’s at lunch, stuff themselves full of carbs and cheese at the buffet, then try to stay awake the rest of the afternoon.
Torre’s also developed into an Old town nightlife destination when it started booking bands in the evenings. Sleepy Truckers were an early favorite, and Torre’s also became known as a place to hear the blues. It regularly booked acts like Pat McJimsey, Rachelle Coba, Matt Walsh, and Moreland and Arbuckle, and it became a regular stop on the Wichita Blues Crawl. When The Roadhouse club on North Broadway closed in the fall of 2007, Torre’s also became a place where jazz fans could find weekly concerts on Friday nights.
Torre’s had a few bumps along the way. In 1998, the founders added a Torre’s in Augusta, but it was ruined by the 1998 Halloween floods, and they had to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection in 2002.
In 2003, the restaurant got a new owner, then in 2006, its liquor license was temporarily revoked and the music stopped when it was discovered that the owner had a prior felony drug conviction.
Torre’s remained a popular Old Town destination for 12 years and hung on until late 2008. (The original Torre’s in Westport was relaunched as Downtown Pizza in 2013 but didn’t last.)
In 2019, the Torre’s space in Wichita was taken over by a bar named Finn’s Lounge.
Today, the building — which is just north of the Brickyard — is home to marketing agency Jajo.
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