Bottega Louie

Downtown at 7th and Grand is a place that has some buzz, about what I don't know. It turns out it is a combination market/patisserie/restaurant/bar. There is a lot going on when you walk in. High ceilings and a huge spacious room organized into sections. A bakery on one side and a cafe/bar on the other. Heading towards the back you meet the hostess that stands before a great dining room and a wall/brick oven. The oven apparently gets to 800 degrees and should only take a couple minutes to cook, but mine took 20. I guess it was a busy day.

I ordered over the phone on the way in, which isn't ideal. It is not a pick up order kind of place. The lady rattled off some combinations that were all classic Neapolitan pizzas and all sounded pretty good. I ordered the Margherita. I parked outside the place and only had 4 minutes to get in and get out because thats how much a quarter gave me at the meter. To my pleasant surprise it looked like this:

A pretty beautiful pizza I would say. Very symmetrical in a haphazard kind of way. Actually if you look at the slice in the lower right quadrant its actually split evenly between sauce and cheese with 2 buttons of basil. Very cool.

Here is the bottom of the wood fired brick oven pizza.

Now the only pizza out here I can compare it too is Antica Pizzeria, which is a classic Neapolitan style as well. For starters Louie gives you a 14 inch pie. It is almost 16 dollars but they could have charged the same and just given you 12 inches. So the price is expensive but not ridiculous. Antica is cheaper however. 10 inch for $11. The crust was wonderfully thin and slightly charred in spots. It wasn't as crispy as I thought it would be though, it ended up having more of a chewy, tough texture and a little dry. The sauce and cheese didn't blend together as well as Antica did. Where there was cheese there was no sauce and vice-versa. I know this was kind of the idea. But the areas where they came together didn't have a real feeling of a happy marriage. The cheese they used seemed like a dry mozzarella and didn't have as light of a feeling as the sauce. The sauce was light and had a interesting flavor. It wasn't as pure as the fresh plum tomatoes at Antica. It had some spices in it, perhaps pepper. It was hardly sweet. It also had a more slow cooked taste to it, like it might have been cooked pre wood oven.

If you can't tell, I didn't like it quite as much as Antica, not to say Antica is all that because it's not. However, to compare Antica with Louie is something I do only because I can. The reality is they are on opposite ends of L.A. and they aren't really in competition. The flavors were unique and the crust was pretty good. Overall it was a great pizza, and I'm happy there is another place that serves this style. It is the kind of pizza; similar to Antica, that leaves a good, fresh, pizza taste on your mouth for the rest of the day.

UPDATE: I went back to Antic Pizzeria the other day and refreshed my taste bud memories. It is a lot better than Bottega Louie. I don't take anything back about what I said, but there is a much bigger difference between the 41/2 slices of Antica and the 4 I gave to this place. I'm taking the rating down a notch.

Bottega Louie

700 S. Grand Ave LA 90017

213-802-1470

Price: $$

Overall:

Piece O' Pizza

Driving down Venice Blvd. coming back from the west coast you pass a place called Piece O' Pizza.  It is pretty noticeable with a large, old town Vegas type sign.  I expect at night for it to be lit up with flash bulbs.  The inside is pretty small with just a few tables.  It looks kind of run down and cheap but most places that mainly deliver are like this.  

I ordered a large 16 inch pizza it was 15 dollars because I got sausage on half.  Normally a large is 12 dollars.  Now that Im writing this I don't know why I was charge 15.   

As you can see it was very, extremely cheesy.  As a result it was very oily.  The sauce I feel could have been pretty awesome but it was hard to get a good taste of it with all the cheese.  I sensed it had some interesting flavors going on that are not usual.  This pizza was pretty unusual all the way around.  It had a serious amount of flour taste from the bottom of the crust and the crust itself was very sweet.  The crust had a different consistency to it than usual.  It was more like a pastry.  It wasn't flakey on the top like some pastry-like crusts.  Internally it was separating into different layers.  It is hard for me to describe, all I can say is with the sweet dough and the texture and all the flour and cheese, I really though I was eating some weird Italian cheese danish.  

Again I can see some people swearing by this pizza.  For me, this was not what I wanted.  Below is a video of my experience.  If for nothing else, watch it to see the amazing chicken head man who roams the streets of Hollywood.   

Piece O' Pizza

11700 Venice Blvd. LA, CA 90066

310-391-9770

Price: $

Overall:

Louigi's Italian Kitchen

Louigi's looks like a trendy little Italian kitchen with its nice out door patio.  Though on the inside its just a counter and another few tables.  They have some interesting sandwiches and pastas, though judging by their pizza I'm not sure how great they are.  Their menu logo has some Italian chef with a pizza and a dog under his arm.  It is supposed to be homey and cute but it just make me worry the dog might get hair in the pizza.

     

I ordered a large cheese pizza that was 14 inches for $10.

As you can see the cheese was very prominent.  It didn't just look that way, there was a lot of it.  The cheese tasted a little wrong to me.  It was all white which seemed good, but the flavor was a little off.  I actually called them back to see if it was actually Mozzarella, they said it was.  Maybe it was low fat or just a low grade cheese.  In my opinion, if they are gonna use a low grade cheese I almost prefer them to just go with a mixture of different cheeses instead.  Anyway the cheese was pretty much the only flavor here so felt I had to investigate.  Everything else tasted pretty bland.  The sauce didn't have much of a chance to survive with all the cheese so there was no fresh tomato taste.  The only flavor that would have come through was oregano but their didn't seem to be any of that.  The crust was decent.  It was very thin and crispy on the outer edge, a little charred.  Though after it cooled it just became kind of chewy and tasteless.  I was disappointed the moment I left the patio.  Maybe next time Louigi.

Louigi's Italian Kitchen

1644 Sawtelle Blvd. West Los Angeles

310-477-4500

Price: 

Overall: