Pizzeria opening across from East High will offer a different type of pie
Wichita has access to Neapolitan-style pizza at Piatto. It can get Detroit-style pizza at Good Company Taps & Spirits. And it will be able to sample Arkansas-style pizza when the new Pinnacle Pizza opens later this month at 832 N. Webb Road.
Now Wichita — the birthplace of Pizza Hut — is about to get a pizza restaurant specializing in yet another type of pizza: New Haven style.
Tom Geagan, who since 2023 has been running a portable pizza business called Tommy’s Apizza (pronounced “ahbeetz”), is opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant of the same name. He’s taking over the space at 2330 E. Douglas that previously was home to Varsity Barbershop. It’s on the northwest corner of Douglas and Grove, right across the street from East High School, and in the early 1980s, it’s where The Spice Merchant operated.
Geagan, who just left his job as head of video production at Koch Inc. so he could devote his full attention to the restaurant, said he hopes to have it open in mid-April.
New Haven-style pizza, he said, is made on a dough that undergoes a four-day fermentation process. The pizzas will be cooked in deck ovens that will help produce a signature char on the underside of the crust, which will be simultaneously crunchy and chewy.
“The New Haven-style pizza is not loaded with a bunch of cheese,” Geagan said. “You should see the tomato sauce on the pizza when you get a cheese pizza. It should be thin: It should not be like you’re picking it up, and it’s flopping all over the place.”
Geagan won’t add Parmesan cheese to his pizzas but will instead use mozzarella and Pecorino Romano cheese, which is made with sheep’s milk and has a salty, tangy flavor profile.
New Haven-style pizzas are typically made in coal ovens, but Geagan attended a pizza convention in Baltimore and discovered a style of electric deck oven that will allow him to make a higher volume of pizzas but still get the right char on the crust.
Actor turned pizza guy
Geagan, 60, was born and raised in Guilford, Connecticut, which is just outside New Haven. He grew up eating pizza made by New Haven restaurants like Frank Pepe, Sally’s Apizza and Modern Apizza. The restaurants all frequently have lines of people that stretch down the street.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do after high school, so his brother— who was attending chiropractic college in California — invited Geagan to live with him. He moved to California, and after about a year, he settled in Santa Barbara, where he attended a city college and became a serious martial arts student.
But after a breakup, he was ready to reinvent himself. He decided he wanted to become an actor and started doing local theater in Santa Barbara. He loved acting and became so serious about it, he moved to London to study the art. Before long, he was performing in musicals and Shakespeare plays.
Geagan returned to California when he finished school and settled in Los Angeles, where he joined a theater company doing all original theater. He did some acting for commercials but had to work in restaurants and bars to stay afloat. He decided he wanted to make films with his friends and started buying cameras. Eventually, he was connected through a friend to a man who had his own travel show on the radio but wanted to turn it into a television show. He hired Geagan to work as his director of photography, and the two traveled to 30 different countries working on the show.
That man, Joseph Rosendo, eventually got his show picked up by PBS, and it was a success. It became an Emmy-winning program known as “Joseph Rosendo’s Travelscope.” Geagan also went on to work on several other travel series.
Nine years ago, a cameraman Geagan knew called him from Wichita, where he’d taken a job working for Koch. There was an opening in the video department, and the friend asked Geagan to fly to Wichita and check it out.
Geagan said he was surprised to find out how much he liked the culture at Koch, and— lured by the promise of a steady paycheck and benefits after years of freelancing — he took the job. Over the years, he said, he got to work on lots of national campaigns and commercials. He also fell in love with Wichita.
During the COVID-19 shutdowns, Geagan said, he was among many who became obsessed with making sourdough bread. One day, his brother called and asked him if he remembered the pizza they grew up eating in New Haven. He pointed him to a video where someone was showing the secrets of making it.
Geagan started making the recipe. Then he began inviting friends over to try the pizza. When he saw their reactions, he decided he wanted to invest in a wood-fired pizza oven for his backyard.
“And then I started looking online and go, ‘Hey, they make these on wheels. What if I started taking it around town?” he said.
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The owners of Central Standard Brewing invited Geagan to start making pizzas on their patio, and that became a regular weekend gig. He developed a following so fervent that he soon could barely keep up with dough production.
“I felt alive,” he said. “I felt like people were having a good time, and I was in the middle of it.”
He needed his own commercial kitchen, he decided. Then he realized that he may as well open his own restaurant. Though he loved his job at Koch, he followed the formula that had gotten him so far in life: taking a risk and following his passion.
“I feel like this is an opportunity for me to create a community space,” he said. “I love people. I want to be the guy that’s out here and talking to people and introducing people and remembering their names and their kids’ names when they come in the door.”
Creating a pizza community
Tommy’s Apizza will serve lunch and dinner, and it will have an open kitchen where people can watch Geagan at work. The space will have a service bar and seating for about 30 inside. He also plans to add seating for about 12 on the east side of the space, near the parking lot.
The restaurant will sell whole pies, but Geagan is toying with the idea of offering slices over the lunch hour — a plan that he thinks will help him serve East High students on their short lunch breaks.
The bar won’t have seating but will offer beer, wine and possibly craft cocktails down the road. People will order their food at the counter then choose a seat. Runners will bring food to the tables.
“I really want them to be community tables, kind of like at CSB,” he said. “If you’re down there, you’ll have some of the longer tables, and people will come and join each other. That’s important to me.”
The restaurant will also have a dedicated spot for to-go orders.
He’ll still use his portable wood-fire oven for catering, Geagan said, and he’s also thinking about having “wood-fire weekends,” where a crew will make pizzas in his original oven for people gathered on the patio.
Geagan said that he’ll provide updates as construction progresses. People also can follow the process on his Instagram page, www.instagram.com/tommysapizza/, and on his Facebook page, www.facebook.com/tommysapizza
This story was originally published January 31, 2026 at 1:02 PM.
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