Alex Seidel opens Roca’s in the former Frontroom Pizza in Lakewood

Gone is the wall of community sports plaques in this article to continue to be is the stocked salad bar (with sneeze guards). Roca’s, the most up-to-date salvation of a prolonged-standing Lakewood pizza parlor, opened Thursday for its community enthusiasts and other returning customers.

Earlier this year, Denver restaurateur Alex Seidel (Fruition, Mercantile, Chook, Fudmill) and chef Tim Bender (Comal, Osage Cafe) took in excess of the house that had been occupied for much more than three many years by Frontroom Pizza. They introduced significant strategies to update the kitchen area and dining home and overhaul the food stuff menu.

Now Roca’s is formally open for enterprise, serving skinny-crust, tavern-type and thick-crust Sicilian-fashion pies as effectively as residence-made noodles in vintage preparations — strozzapreti alla diavola, spaghetti alla vonghole, for case in point. The location is cozy and charming, with paper in excess of checkered tablecloths and enough brass and subway tile to experience fashionable.

Go for your preferred comforting pasta dishes, as effectively as for the reasonably priced bottles of wine, and continue to be for dessert, specially thick slices of tiramisu. And go forward and sidle up to that salad bar, a surprise late-pandemic comeback, and an crucial spared relic from Frontroom. (Seidel’s wife, Melissa, said it also reminded her of childhood birthday events at Pizza Hut.)