Pizza Lupo — Restaurant in Louisville

This is an absolutely incredible restaurant with delicious, authentic pizzas! First, please do yourself AND the staff a favor and book a reservation to dine here via the Resy app. This will make everyone's lives much easier AND stress-free. This is a smaller location than it may look in the pictures, and it is a popular restuarant (after all, it has been voted BEST PIZZA in Louisville multiple years in a row since 2021, so it's safe to say the secret is out). Plus, if you're a Murder By Death Fan like my husband and I are, you'll be VERY happy you made a reservation because this guarantees you'll have a seat. No reservation means you might not get a seat here. So, as for our visit, we made a 2-and-a-half-hour drive from Ohio to be able to enjoy this restaurant, so we made reservations. Upon our arrival, the staff was incredibly kind and attentive. We got our table immediately. As soon as we entered and walked to our table, we saw that the atmosphere was exactly as I had hoped it would be - that cool, dark vibe that makes evening dining feel intimate, cozy, and fun, just like an evening on the town should feel. For an appetizer, we had the "Heirloom Tomatoes", which are sliced local tomatoes with fresh stracciatella cheese and green crunch oil. These came with a side of wood-fired pita bread. These heirloom tomatoes were delicious and fresh! I found the stracciatella cheese to be delightful. I'm an Italian-American, so it is hard to find stracciatella cheese in the basic Italian restaurants that are around (like Olive Garden, for example), which is what really makes Pizza Lupo such a great, stand-out establishment. And it's why Pizza Lupo was a hit initially (and still is, truly) - "Lupo’s opening menu of Neapolitan pizza and seasonally-focused pasta dishes was a hit in the Louisville market, not accustomed to Neapolitan pizza. A big key to its initial success, Max Balliet says, was 'guiding people and letting them know this is a little bit different than what you are used to.'" For our wood-fired, sourdough pizza, we ordered the "Milk and Honey" pizza, which has gorgonzola, mozzarella, garlic, pecorino cream, spicy local honey, and basil. Our only wish is that the honey had a lot more spice/heat, but we know that not everyone likes spice/heat the way we do, so it's hard to make those kinds of adjustments to keep every single person happy. Otherwise, that pizza was INCREDIBLE. Wow! Their menu is very focused and has 10 pizzas to choose from, and also has a few pasta dishes to choose from, as well. We also enjoyed a few cocktails that were on their menu: Lambrusco Sour, Chinotto Old Fashioned, and the Tommy Gun. They have a full bar, so feel free to ask for a drink that isn't on one of their drink menus, as well - I did. I asked for my signaure drink, "The Godfather", and the bartender whipped one up beautifully. For those who are designated drivers, they have a great-tasting non-alcoholic menu, too. My husband recommends the "Chinotto Dream". You will not be disappointed when you visit here! We are looking forward to returning to this restaurant next month so we can try a...

My wife and I decided to dine here on New Years Eve for the " Feast of Seven Fishes". Overall the experience was good. There are a few things that made me give it a 3 star rating. When we first arrived there were two open booths. We asked to sit in a booth and we were told that those were reserved. We had made reservations, but I guess we didn't specify that we wanted a booth. We were there for over two hours and neither of those booths were occupied the whole time we were there. The chairs we sat in were hard and after two hours extremely uncomfortable. We must have been sitting directly under a speaker, for the music was loud and seemed to me unfitting. It appeared to be music from the 1920’s; not blues or jazz, but the type that reminded me of the cartoon of the frog singing “hello my baby…”. Extremely irritating to endure during an expensive, and lengthy, meal. On to the food. The first course was Sable fish Tonnato. It tasted very good. It had a large caper berry in the middle of it and I didn't quite know what to do with that. The second course was a Cioppino. This was an excellent dish. The only thing that was missing was bread. We asked our waitress if they had any, and she stated that they were not serving any bread for this meal. In my opinion this was a big mistake. It is a Neapolitian pizza place. How hard would it have been to serve bread; I think it definitely would have complemented several of the courses. The third course was Spaghetti Alla Puttanesca. This dish was also very good. I really enjoyed the black squid ink spaghetti and the calabrian chili peppers. It was seasoned well and tasted delicious. The fourth course was one of my least favorites. It was Smelts Fritti. They were supposed to be cornmeal-fried smelt. There was very little cornmeal and the dish was very bland.The fifth course was Baccala. These were very tasty and I found all the ingredients worked well together. The sixth course was Broccolini. This was also one of my least favorites. I didn't know if this was supposed to be served hot or cold. Unfortunately, mine was somewhere in between. I had one bite and that was all I could stand. The final course was the Sardine Salad. The salad was very good, everything tasted delicious, except the piece of sardine, which was tough and did not taste good at all. It seemed that the sardine was added to get that seventh fish course; it really didn't belong on the plate. After the seventh course, we were served some Neopolitan ice cream. I made the mistake of starting on the end that had a lot of salt on it and it ruined the ice cream experience for me. When I got the check and with the tip, this was an expensive meal. Everything considered, I don't feel like it was worth it. It wasn't a bad experience, but it could have been much better. This was my first time eating at Pizza Lupo. I am willing to try their regular menu, but with all the good restaurants in Louisville, I am not sure I would go out of my...

Well unfortunately, my experience lined up with some other reviews listed on here that were not favorable. I went with a party of 3. We walked in and were greeted with no hello or welcome, just a cold energy, “do you have a reservation?” I responded “no” as I looked around at 4 open tables and an open bar. The hostess replied, “well we can likely get you a seat at the bar in 15 minutes.” I asked if there were any other options as a member of my party was an elder lacking youthful mobility and sitting on a barstool is challenging for him. She replied, “no - do you want the bar in 15 minutes?” I apprehensively responded with, “yes.”

She didn’t offer us a place to sit or guide us in any way. So we went outside. There was no organized place to wait while waiting for the table and we leaned against the fence outside to get out of the way of cars coming in and out of the parking lot.

The 15 minute timeline was accurate and once we came back inside, we again weren’t greeted with a smile, but she said, “someone gave up their booth and wanted to move so I’ve put you in the booth,” not friendly or warm and not looking directly at me while she spoke. However, I was relieved for the booth.

The waitress we got was kind. We ordered food and then yet again we were disappointed with how it panned out. One of our party ordered pasta and it came out over 20 minutes before the pizza we ordered. So she was finished eating by the time the other 2 in our party got their food. We asked about it at the 15 minute mark and were loosely brushed off with an answer of, “it’s coming”…. Not….”our apologies, let me check on that for you.”

The pizza arrived at our table, but had a large burnt bubble in the crust (see picture). It was a solid tasting pizza with good flavor, but nothing to really rave about. The pasta was definitely not worth the $24 price point.

Overall, I would like to love this place since it came highly recommended that I try it, but it has lots of opportunity for improvement and consistency of customer experience. The restaurant doesn’t seem to have the team energy of really caring highly about the overall experience of the customer. Lots of individual roles happening with some people smiling, some not, some employees seem like they want to be there, some not.

Just FYI, the parking lot down the street is a great ancillary lot, but people do fly on the road so crossing to get to the restaurant can be a bit dicey, particularly if you have anyone in your party with compromised mobility levels.

Anyways, check it out for yourself. Hopefully you’ll have an experience in line with the higher reviews or maybe they will change their processes/staff to improve the overall...