photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

The Mass Street Ale House has opened in the location that formerly housed Quinton's in downtown Lawrence at 615 Massachusetts Street.

Craft beer and competition barbecue will be taking the place of bread bowls of potato soup and pressed sandwiches at the location that formerly housed Quinton’s in downtown Lawrence.

That sentence has so many carbs in it, I almost fell asleep writing it. Not that that’s a bad thing. A carb coma from a bowl of Quinton’s potato soup sometimes was the only thing that got me through an afternoon meeting at the office.

Now, I’ll have to find another strategy, or take the chance of being fully alert through an office meeting. As we briefly reported in August, there were signs the bar and sandwich shop Quinton’s was closing for good — it hadn’t been open since the early days of the pandemic — and something called Mass Street Ale House was taking its place at 615 Massachusetts St.

Indeed, Mass Street Ale House opened earlier this week, and the Quinton’s brand in Lawrence is officially done after almost 30 years in business.

“It was bittersweet to some degree,” Brandon Graham, owner of Mass Street Ale House, said of closing the Quinton’s location, which he had owned since 2016. “My wife and I went on our first date there in college.

“But in our business, you always have to be thinking about changing and evolving to keep things fresh.”

At the moment, there is not much that is fresher than craft beer, which is one of the reasons Graham decided to go with the Mass Street Ale House concept. Lawrence often talks about trying to be the craft beer capital of Kansas, and Graham said Mass Street Ale House will strive to be a place where people can try all of the locally produced beers, plus many more from surrounding states.

“The local brewery scene has grown so much, and really the state as a whole and all of the Midwest,” Graham said. “There is a lot the entire Midwest has to offer.”

Graham said the establishment has 16 taps of beer and will stock about 20 varieties of bottled beer. He said plans call for the ale house to rotate beers in and out of the lineup so that customers can usually find something new.

“We believe Lawrence is a community of educated craft beer drinkers who are looking for new flavor profiles,” Graham said.

Hopefully, the same is true when it comes to barbecue. Graham said Mass Street Ale House will start serving barbecue in the next couple of months. But don’t look for Graham and his crew — in addition to the Ale House, he’s president of the Lawrence-based Jefferson’s restaurant group — to be cooking the barbecue.

Instead, the company has struck a deal with a competition barbecue team that is looking to get into the restaurant business. That group, which Graham declined to name, will have full control over the food operations of the ale house. A new smoker is being installed at the restaurant, and Graham said it will allow for a full-scale barbecue menu.

“That smoker can handle about anything,” he said.

Graham said the menu may occasionally bring back some version of old Quinton’s favorites, like the soups, but that wouldn’t be the biggest part of what the restaurant does.

“It will be barbecue focused,” he said. “It will be a barbecue joint inside Mass Street Ale House.”

While the pandemic isn’t fully behind the community, Graham said he was enthusiastic about opening the establishment now, and he said Douglas County’s vaccination success played a role in that thinking. Business also has been pretty good at his company’s other locations, including the Basil Leaf Cafe in Lawrence and an expanding number of Jefferson’s locations.

In addition to the two Jefferson’s locations in Lawrence, the company now has a Jefferson’s operating in North Kansas City and is opening a Jefferson’s in Lenexa. The company also has launched a new brand, called WingStand. Its first location is in Mission, and as the name suggests, it is all about chicken wings.

There are no plans to open a WingStand in Lawrence currently, but rather the company will focus on ensuring that Mass Street Ale House is successful.

“I’m excited about it,” Graham said. “I think it will be more centered on Lawrence residents and year-round community members, where Quinton’s had become a little bit more collegiate focused.”