715 Restaurant
CITY GUIDES | KANSAS
Where Jayhawks Eat: The 15 Best Lawrence Restaurants Right Now
By Jamie Dutton
Updated Aug. 25, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.
The search for the best restaurants in Lawrence, Kansas, begins on Massachusetts Street, where Jayhawk fans move between bars, bakeries, and dining rooms inside century-old storefronts. Keep going, though, because some of the city’s most interesting cooking happens in East Lawrence and the neighborhoods beyond downtown. On my visits, I’ve found handmade pasta, oysters flown into the Plains, dumplings laced with chile oil, and a French-influenced chef’s counter that gives dinner the proper sense of occasion. These 15 Lawrence restaurants explain why eating well here requires more than a game-day plan.
715
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715 has spent 15 years turning a narrow Massachusetts Street storefront into one of Lawrence’s most dependable dinner reservations. Chef Jake Dodds-Sloan oversees a menu grounded in house-made pasta, seasonal produce, and Italian technique, with cocktails that warrant arriving before the reservation. The low lighting, long bar, and steady clink of wine glasses create plenty of atmosphere without asking diners to dress for it.
Best for: Handmade pasta and cocktails
Big Mill
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Big Mill occupies a former laundromat named for the windmill that once stood nearby, but its most compelling history lesson comes baked in a rectangular pan. The Detroit Deluxe pizza layers pepperoni, ricotta, and pecorino over an airy crust with crisp, cheese-caramelized edges. The Mill burger adds a distinctly Kansas accent with house-made Korean chile sauce, while coney dogs and a full bar broaden the appeal beyond pizza. Restored wood floors and original tin ceilings preserve some of the building’s past without turning dinner into a museum visit.
Best for: Detroit-style pizza
The Burger Stand
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A Mass Street staple, The Burger Stand at the Casbah has earned national acclaim (including a nod from Zagat as a Top 25 Burger Joint). The Fire Burger, with habanero and cactus jam, is as bold as the crowd, and the truffle fries are a must. The vibe is unfussy, the shakes are thick, and the menu’s creativity never flags.
Best for: Inventive burgers and fries
Cellar Door Café & Pâtisserie
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Louis Wigen-Toccalino opened Cellar Door in 2020, giving downtown Lawrence a bakery where the small scale leaves room for frequent experiments. Croissants and other laminated pastries rotate through the case, but the griddled sourdough English muffins have become a signature. Their craggy interiors catch plenty of butter and make an especially good foundation for the café’s breakfast sandwiches. Cellar Door also serves coffee and a compact breakfast menu, making it an easy stop before Mass Street fills for the day.
Best for: Pastries and breakfast sandwiches
Culinaria
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Aaron Pillar and Regan Lehman Pillar began Culinaria as a catering company in 2009 before opening their East Lawrence restaurant eight years later. The menu draws broadly from the Mediterranean, with shareable plates, warm spices, fresh herbs, and cocktails built around citrus. Because the selections change frequently, dinner works best as a table-wide affair: order several dishes, add flatbread, and let everyone negotiate over the last swipe of sauce. The brick patio remains one of Lawrence’s better places for stretching dinner past sunset.
Best for: Mediterranean plates on the patio
Encore Asian Bistro
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Encore has occupied its downtown Massachusetts Street address since 2007, serving a broad Asian menu with particularly strong noodle dishes, dumplings, and vegetarian options. Start with the house-made shrimp-and-pork wontons in garlic chile sauce, then order the beef teriyaki bamboo pot with flank steak, mushrooms, scallions, and fried rice. Singapore rice noodles bring shrimp, eggs, bean sprouts, and yellow curry, while Malaysian kari potatoes and ma po tofu with shiitake mushrooms give vegetarians something more substantial than the usual collection of substitutions.
Best for: Wontons and Singapore noodles
Free State Brewing Company
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When Free State opened in 1989, it became Kansas’s first legal brewery in more than a century. The downtown brewpub remains a Lawrence institution, particularly on game days, when pints move quickly through the brick-walled dining room. Cheddar ale soup remains the required opening order, followed by fish and chips with Free State beer batter. The taps cover the brewery’s familiar flagships and rotating seasonal releases, offering a concise introduction to one of the names that helped establish Kansas craft beer.
Best for: Local beer and pub food
Lucky Seb’s
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Chef-owner Will Soo folds Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and American influences into a menu built around dumplings and playful bar food. The pork dumplings arrive plump and seared, with chile oil carrying ginger and garlic into each bite. Loaded kimchi fries pile spicy pork, cheese sauce, kimchi, scallions, and gochujang over a base meant for sharing, while smoked salmon rangoons and the Pho’rench dip show how far Soo is willing to extend the idea of a dumpling bar. The teal-painted dining room can get loud, especially once the tables begin filling with bamboo steamers and local beer.
Best for: Handmade dumplings
Mass Street Fish House
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Mass Street Fish House gives downtown Lawrence a dedicated oyster bar, with a rotating selection served raw, dressed, or by the tower. The rest of the menu changes with the available catch, moving among dishes such as mussels, ruby trout, and ahi tuna nachos rather than treating seafood as an afterthought. Cocktails lean crisp and bracing, making the bar especially useful for oysters and a martini before dinner—or as dinner when another round sounds better than an entrée.
Best for: Oysters and martinis
Merchants Pub & Plate
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Merchants occupies a former bank on Massachusetts Street, where 30 taps make local and regional beer as important as the food. The famous Brussels sprouts remain the reliable opening order, roasted with bacon and finished with maple-balsamic reduction. Goat cheese dip, blackened Atlantic salmon tacos, burgers, and seasonal entrées give the menu enough range for a table split between bar food and a full dinner. The soaring ceilings and traces of the building’s banking past make it one of downtown Lawrence’s more distinctive dining spaces.
Best for: Local beer and seasonal cooking
Sable Kitchen + Bar
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Chef-owner Jeffrey Ward gives Lawrence a French-influenced restaurant that treats dinner like an occasion without turning it into theater. The menu changes with the season, but Ward builds dishes from recognizable ingredients and then pushes them somewhere less expected. Market gazpacho gets watermelon and almond-paprika oil, while turbot arrives with littleneck clams, new potatoes, sorrel, and chermoula. The poulet en croûte wraps roasted chicken, leeks, bacon, and onion in puff pastry. Order à la carte in the dining room or book the five-course chef’s counter, where the limited number of seats lets the kitchen show more of its hand.
Best for: The chef’s-counter tasting
Taqueria La Pasadita
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The Andrade family keeps the formula direct at Taqueria La Pasadita: choose among tacos, burritos, tortas, quesadillas, and gringas, then settle on a filling. Carnitas tacos need little beyond salsa verde and lime, while the birria gringa folds braised beef and melted cheese into a tortilla crisped on the flat-top. Al pastor, tripa, tamales, and other options give repeat visits plenty of range. Seating is limited, but the food travels well enough that eating tacos over the hood of a car hardly qualifies as a hardship.
Best for: Tacos and birria
Terrebonne Po' Boys
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Terrebonne spent years serving Louisiana cooking from a tiny spot on Vermont Street before moving into a larger Massachusetts Street address in 2022. The additional seats haven’t changed the essential order: a fried shrimp po’ boy loaded with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and remoulade. Gumbo begins with a dark roux and comes stocked with okra, while other po’ boys make room for roast beef, catfish, and Louisiana sausage. Add hush puppies or fried okra and accept that lunch may require more napkins than originally planned.
Best for: Po’ boys and gumbo
WheatFields Bakery Café
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WheatFields bakes naturally leavened bread on the stone hearth of a wood-fired brick oven, giving its baguettes, sourdough, and country French loaves deeply browned crusts and chewy interiors. Those breads form the backbone of the lunch menu, including a pastrami Reuben on sourdough rye and a croque monsieur with ham, smoked Gouda, and Swiss. The pastry counter adds croissants, cinnamon rolls, cookies, and fruit tarts, although the most popular laminated pastries have a habit of disappearing early.
Best for: Artisan bread and lunch
Wine Dive + Kitchen
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Wine Dive pairs a broad bottle list with food substantial enough to keep dinner from becoming an extended tasting session. The current menu runs from seafood mac and seared salmon to hanger steak, filet, ribeye, and Kansas City strip, giving red-wine drinkers several sensible directions. Servers can steer diners beyond familiar grapes without delivering a lecture, and much of the list is available by the glass. Order a steak, ask for a recommendation, and let the pairing determine what comes next.
Best for: Wine and steaks
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