CLOSED. Sadly, Benny Impellizzeri closed this Highlands landmark in February, 2005. However, those who love this landmark style of pie can take solace in the 10-year reign of his brother, Tony, purveying a similarly fine product in the East End. We recommend Tony Impellizzeri's Italian, 108 Vieux Carre Drive (just off Shelbyville Road east of Hurstbourne), (502) 326-5009.

Impellizzeri's *** Impellizzeri's
2306 Bardstown Road
(502) 451-7177
Remember Independence Day, the bad science-fiction blockbuster of a few years back, with its gigantic, discus-shaped UFOs that would hover over cities and historical monuments, so huge that they would block out the light?

Well, the pizza at Impellizzeri's is something like that: Massive disks, broad and thick, so unrealistically oversize that you might think they came from a Hollywood studio's special-effects department.

It's good though. There's nothing evil or scary about these magisterial pizzas, so large that a small traditional pizza with sausage and onions made us not only Monday night dinner but provided leftovers for lunch on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

It's arguable that Impellizzeri makes the best pizzas in town, and they've got a gallery full of Louisville Magazine's "Best of Louisville" popularity-contest awards on the wall to prove it.

It's one of my favorites, too, although I have to be candid and report that Impellizzeri's pizzas are best taken home and enjoyed in the comfort of your own dining room. For reasons that I don't fully understand but that I'm sure make sense to the management, dining in is a spartan experience at best. The dining area is small and basic, with about eighteen sturdy "two-top" tables and dinette chairs crammed into a room just about large enough to house them. There's no non-smoking area, no double door to keep wintry drafts from blasting the room everytime someone comes in or goes out, and the beer list - incongruously in a place where high quality is obviously job one in the pizza department - is limited to mass-market labels: Bud, But Lite and Michelob. ("Nobody really asks for anything else except maybe Coors Light," the waitress shrugged.)

But the pizza's the thing, to the extent that even side orders and culinary alternatives here (like the popular bread sticks, $3.99 for a half-dozen) are easy to gloss over. A combo salad ($4.99 for two) was more than credible, pale but crisp and cool iceberg lettuce with surprisingly red tomatoes for January, bits of onion, mozzarella and peperoncini pepper rings and a smooth blue-cheese dressing with a pleasantly tangy edge that hinted at the presence of buttermilk or something similar in the recipe. A selection of pasta dishes is also available, from $8.99 for spaghetti with "Mom's Homemade" sauce to $10.99 for pastas with sausages, meatballs or chicken.

The pizza menu, though, looks something like a railroad timetable, a complicated matrix of sizes, types and options that fill a full page and that range in price from $7.99 (for a 12-inch "New York-style" with cheese) to a whopping $37.99 (for an 11-by-13-inch large Sicilian deep-dish pizza with everything including extra cheese). If you want anchovies, you'll pay an extra $3 for a can that you can open and serve yourself. They won't cook them on pizzas, we were told, because the fishy oil runs onto the pizza stones and flavors everyone's pies. That seemed fair enough.

Despite the appetizing smells wafting from the kitchen (which can be seen through a glass window in a brick wall next to the bar), we exercised will power and avoided over-ordering, sticking with a 12-inch "traditional round pizza" with sausage and onions ($16.99). Although the price seemed high by local pizzeria standards, the size of it put everything into perspective. A beautiful crisp, stone-oven crust bore a mound of toppings at least an inch thick at the middle, and what toppings they were! Quality Italian sausage with delicious flavors of fennel seed and a judicious sprinkle of hot red pepper; crisp, just-roasted diced white onion; silken, mild and stretchy mozzarella; and a thick, tomato-paste sauce with hints of herbs. It was an extremely good, well-made pizza, so filling that one slice made dinner for my wife and, well, three were plenty for me. That left four to bring home in aluminum foil, and, as noted, it made an excellent lunch for the next three days, reheating as good as new in the toaster oven.

Dessert? You've got to be kidding! Dinner for two, with two $1.75 mugs of Michelob each, came to an impressive $33.90, plus a $5 tip. It's not the cheapest pizza in town, but then, Rolex is not the cheapest watch. $$