Wolfgang Puck in Louisville

I was in Louisville, my home town, this past weekend, and had the occasion to go downtown on a family business errand. I hadn't been downtown in perhaps years, and was pleasantly surprised at how "big city" it looked. In the lobby of the convention center we found a new place, "Wolfgang Puck Express." With an open line, and a wood fired pizza oven, it was hard to resist.

Friendly folks gave us menus and directed us toward a long but fast-moving line. Once our order was taken and paid for, we helped ourselves to our beverages. My sister had a coke but I had asked for unsweetened tea. The only tea they had was a very heavily mango infused tea, not particularly to my taste.


The extensive menu features Wolfgang Puck’s hand-crafted gourmet pizzas, a variety of pastas, sandwiches, soups, fresh salads, including Wolfgang’s famous Chinois™ chicken salad, and Wolfgang’s classics, such as ginger salmon and rosemary rotisserie chicken with garlic mashed potatoes. In this picture, you see one of the salads, quite an astonishing stack of goodies for the price. One with grilled salmon topped out the price list at $10.95. Others came with grilled chicken or rotisserie beef. And to the right of the salad is one of the pocket sandwiches, so large I could never have eaten it all.

In the background you can see the pizza oven.


My sister and I shared a very tasty "petite Caesar." As you can see it wasn't so petite. The lettuce was crisp and the dressing was one of the best in my recent memory. We also split a Tuscan vegetable pizza, loaded with roasted tomato, eggplant, fennel, rapini, mozzarella and fontina cheeses and pesto sauce. Boy! Was it ever good, and again, more than the two of us together could finish.

My only regret is that it is downtown, and that makes it a long way to go for lunch. They are open in the evenings, but are a bit more casual than I would like for a dinner out. But any time I'm going to be close to downtown, I would sure stop in again!