Louie Bossi Ristorante

Louie Bossi's Ristorante, Bar & Pizzeria is an Italian restaurant on East Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Nearly everything on its menu, from bread to salumi, is made in-house.

Big Time Restaurant Group, founded by Todd Herbst, Bill Watson and chef Lisabet Summa, opened it in June 2015 in the former Solita space and named it after its chef-partner. Louie Bossi grew up in Astoria, Queens, and started out as a boy helping in a neighborhood pizzeria. In Florida he joined Big Time as a grill cook and worked up to executive chef of Big City Tavern, also on Las Olas, where his house-cured salumi became known. He wrote the menu of the new restaurant together with Summa.

Bossi learned charcuterie from Brian Polcyn, co-author of two books on curing, and became a certified master pizza maker through the Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli. His menu borrows from three Italian cities: Parma for the cured meats, Naples for the pizzas and Rome for the pastas. Neapolitan pizzas come out of a wood-burning oven, and the kitchen also makes its own pasta, jams, gelato and limoncello. A Neapolitan-style pizza of his placed second at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas.

The building covers 930 m² (10,000 sq ft) and is laid out like an Italian piazza, with an open kitchen around the oven and a salumi bar inside; outdoors a fire pit and a long bar open onto the boulevard. Italian bottles fill most of the wine pages. Bossi's wife Antonia works as maître d'. A second Louie Bossi's later opened on Palmetto Park Road in Boca Raton.