Category Archives: Italian (and Pizza)

$ Budget (under $30), Italian (and Pizza), QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

Fried pie? Boombozz fried pizza wins our applause

When I was a kid, I looked forward to road trips as an occasion for fried pie, a rare culinary treat that seemed to exist only in those exotic places where people lived among cornfields and tobacco patches and spoke in a slow drawl.

Fried pie! We never had anything like that at home. It was a pie-crust turnover, loaded with fruit filling – apple was as popular as Mom or the Flag – folded over, sealed into a fat half-moon and deep-fried until it sizzled. Hot and crisp, juicy and sweet, it was just the right size for eating out of hand. Yum!

A single fried pie probably packed 1,000 calories, but at that age I didn’t mind. Now I do, and I haven’t indulged for years, maybe decades. The other day, though, I ran across an even more tempting take on fried pie that I just couldn’t resist.
Continue reading Fried pie? Boombozz fried pizza wins our applause →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), Italian (and Pizza), QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

Coals Brings The Heat To Make A Fine Pizza

If you grew up eating pizza in Louisville – or for that matter just about anywhere in the U.S. outside, possibly, the urban Northeast – you may be excused for believing that pizza is all about the toppings. Sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, bacon and pineapple and even anchovies, oh, my: Pile ’em high! And don’t forget to dollop on the sweet, sweet tomato sauce and a lake of molten, stringy cheese. Continue reading Coals Brings The Heat To Make A Fine Pizza →

$ Budget (under $30), Hurstbourne, Middletown, Jeffersontown, Italian (and Pizza), underSlideshowEntries

Stop! In the name of Loui Loui’s Motown pizza

Okay, let’s review the geography of pizza, nature’s most nearly perfect food.

Born in Naples, Italy, it came to the United States with Italian immigrants and soon became a favorite in New York City and the urban Northeast.

Like so many other things, this deliciously cheesy, tangy, salty supper on a plate went national with the Baby Boom. And as it grew, it evolved, taking on regional differences as cities made it their own.
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$$ Modest ($30-$50), Italian (and Pizza), QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

DiOrio’s earns its place on Pizza Row

When DiOrio’s pizza first settled into the former home of Karem’s Meats in St. Matthews, it already seemed that this booming nightspot zone was attracting more pizzerias than it could reasonably handle … and that was before Coal’s or Mellow Mushroom came to town.
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$$ Modest ($30-$50), Italian (and Pizza), QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

“It takes real bocconcini”: Mellow Mushroom takes on the locals

“Downtown” St. Matthews has come a long way, from the generation when it was best known for dark bars populated by portly gentlemen drinking cold beer, to the modern era that finds it chockablock with hipster bars populated by trendy young folks wearing skinny jeans and drinking specialty cocktails. I won’t even open the door to a discussion about whether this trend is beneficial or regrettable, although I’ll suggest that this opinion lies largely in the eye of the beholder.
Continue reading “It takes real bocconcini”: Mellow Mushroom takes on the locals →

$ Budget (under $30), Italian (and Pizza), LEO's Eats, New and noteworthy, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries

We get mellow at the Mushroom

I would rather not over-share about this, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want me to do that either; so let’s just say that a few years ago, I was invited to participate in a routine diagnostic exam that’s widely recommended for Baby Boomers as we slouch through middle age. I might add that this procedure involves a form of mild anesthesia so soft and fuzzy and warmly relaxing that I’m pretty sure it would bring down SWAT teams of DEA agents in black helicopters if it wasn’t administered by medical professionals.

Bear with me here.
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$$$ Upscale ( $50 - $80), Frankfort Ave., Clifton, Crescent Hill, Italian (and Pizza), LEO's Eats, underSlideshowEntries

DiFabio’s offers fine, family-style Italian

“Casapela.” Utter this word slowly, with Mediterranean rhythm, assonant and mellifluous, “Cah-sa-PEH-laaaah,” and it sounds as Italian as Tony Bennett crooning “Arrivederci, Roma.” But plug it into Google Translate or ask a friendly Italian what “Casapela” means, exactly, and you come up with nothing. Zero, zip, even, well, niente.
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$$ Modest ($30-$50), Frankfort Ave., Clifton, Crescent Hill, Italian (and Pizza), underSlideshowEntries

Volare continues the upscale Italian tradition

“Volare, oh oh … Cantare, oh oh oh oh … Let’s fly way up to the clouds …” With Dean Martin’s classic rendition of the pop Italian ballad firmly planted in our ears, let’s talk about Volare and how it fits into the pantheon of Louisville’s top Italian tables.

It’s all connected, after all, and goes back to the 1970s, when, for a century or more, “Italian” food had meant the hearty, tomato-sauced American-immigrant fare that families brought through Ellis Island from Calabria and Sicily, Italy’s poverty-ridden deep south.
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