Lou Boccardi’s Restaurant

ONLY order pizza and/​or house salad with house dressing. Both are amazing. Everything else, including their cleanliness, is questionable.

Lasagna was decent. Salad was awful, it was seriously iceberg lettuce with a cube of tomato and the house dressing was just weird/​bad. My wife and I both had about 2 bites and done. Service was a little slow considering there was nobody else there. Very disappointing.

for an Italian restaurant on the hill, this was very disappointing. Even though there weren’t many people there, the service was extremely slow. We were there about 15 minutes before the waiter came to see us. We overheard him say that they were understaffed but it still seemed extremely slow. the place looked run down and not well maintained. for example, the walls looked dirty and the baseboards were peeling. We both had a salad which consisted of iceberg lettuce, provel cheese, 1 small cube of tomato (although my boyfriend says he didn’t have any), and an overabundance of ranch. the bread was cold and hard and tasted like ordinary deli bread bought yesterday at Schnucks. I ordered tortellini. the sauce was watery, how did decent taste, and the pasta was overcooked. my boyfriend ordered chicken parmesan; the chicken was overcooked, the breading hard, and the sauce watery. Basically it tasted like cheap cafeteria food. the price was average for a decent Italian meal so we expected much more. we definitely won’t go back. better off going to Olive Garden.

I’ve been in the kitchen on a personal level with a friend. The owner, the daughter of late Lou eats nothing from her own restaurant. She constantly repeating this… Nothing. It’s all bad food!
She licks her fingers as she fingers slops plain spaghetti in water on the plate, Parmesan from a can from the grocery store, Carmel & whip cream from the grocery store.
The food quality is low-​grade & over priced.
The dishes aren’t washed properly because the kitchen has no dish washer due to the kitchens tiny size, it’s as tiny as the dining area which is grim in ambiance & filthy carpets. Old storage area is exposed with no door, no curtain full of cleaning supplies as you head to the upstairs 15 which seats max 15 people.
Lilly is always bragging about police watching the restaurant because she doesn’t trust her customers & she brags of carrying weapons. Yea, not quite neighborhood feeling. There are so many gorgeous restaurants on The Hill, this is not an option!
Lilly takes pride in being the only female owner in the area. Repeatedly expresses this.
Lock your husbands & boyfriends up because she sleeps with anyone to keep it running!

There are not many things that I look forward to upon returning home than Saint Louis Style Pizza. I love going to Lou’s for the best pizza in Saint Louis. It’s a smaller place, old, outdated décor, but it’s on The Hill, and it feels like I’m back home when I go inside to eat. Being in the Armed Services it’s difficult to get that taste of Saint Louis anywhere but home. I can only recommend the pizza at Lou’s because it honestly all I go there for, so don’t quote me on anything else. Pizza’s are amazing and hopefully they continue to be for a log time! Stop in and have a «Salsiccia Pizza» on the Hill!

BEST PIZZA IN ST. LOUIS — I’ve been going to Lou Boccardi’s since I was 3 years old, so I’m pretty biased in that this is a treasured restaurant I’ve been enjoying since childhood (I’m now 45 years old). I haven’t lived in St. Louis in 25 years and was pleasantly surprised today (12÷3÷2014) to find it just as I remembered. The pizza was great (as always) and our waitress was such a pleasant reminder of why this is a great neighborhood joint (even if, like myself, you aren’t from the neighborhood). Her name is Judy and it was hard to beleive it was her first day. She did a remarkable job and although it was her first day on the job, you could tell it was not her first acquaintance with the establishment. She knew the menu well and made recommendations which were right on the mark.
I hope you enjoy this restaurant as much as myself and that it becomes a tradition like it has become mine — I always take new friend there (as I did today) and he loved it!
Enjoy!

It has been a year since my wife and I had visited Lou Boccardi’s, on the Hill.
This visit was with several friends who I worked with, who get together on the first Friday of each month for a social event.
Two of our members are handicapped, and this was the first problem The restaurant is not ADA compliant, and I honestly don’t know how they get away with having a 1 person restroom, so small that a person in a wheelchair cannot use it.
Another member of the group uses a cane, and he had trouble getting into the tiny restroom. They should be ashamed of themselves.
The restaurant was nearly empty at lunch but it still took lousy service and poor kitchen management to bring 2 of 6 meals out 10 minutes before the rest of the diners got their food, and for the 4 people with pizza to get them cold, and almost devoid of cheese, toppings and sauce.
Even trying to get our check and paying was far too time consuming and complex.
I am vexed about the situation, and will not return.

THIS PLACE. This is what every restaurant on the Hill should be, minus the pretense and gimmicks. My boyfriend and I come here for «special» dates. No, maybe it’s nothing special compared to the other places on the Hill, and it’s never crowded — and that’s why I love it. The atmosphere is very cozy without being particularly upscale, and the service is great. And it has all your Hill favorites perfected — red/​white sauce, t-​ravs, etc.
My usual is the ravioli florentine, which is light but filling & NEVER lacking on sauce.
My only gripe: The house dressing, which is celery-​based, is disgusting & you’ll be tasting celery for days. Their Italian dressing is great, though, so stick with that for a true taste of the Hill.

We were excited to try the «Authentic Italian Menu,» but we were mislead by some of the menu descriptions. Gnocchi was listed under the Seafood portion of the menu, supposedly including shrimp. Our dish came out and the shrimps were actually the tiny salad shrimps you would find at Sam’s Club, and the shrimps weren’t even cleaned/​deveined. We had to scour for the shrimp in the pool of cold gnocchi since there were so few – this is barely considered seafood. Carbonara dish was bland but nothing a little bit of salt and pepper couldn’t fix. Service was okay and the owner (?) did make an effort for serve us quickly with the restaurant taking care of two «large» tables. Bread was offered towards the middle of our meal and not in the beginning as most restaurants have the courtesy of doing. A 6″ baguette and small packages of butter is not necessarily what I would consider authentic Italian.

I felt like some Italian food and struggled to decide between Cunetto’s and Boccardi’s. I opted for Boccardi’s because it was a beautiful day and I wanted to sit downstairs by the window.
I ate in the late afternoon when business was slow and the service was fast. I think my server was named Monica. She was very friendly and even recommended another local restaurant.
The pizza was probably the best I’ve had at Boccardi’s, which means it was great.

Great Service! Great Pizza! Great Beer!
I understand some of the negative reviews on the service but guests must be understanding when they review a place on the service! For having a full house, service was great!
Definitely coming back and often!

Lou Boccardi’s is a classic family tradition. My grandparents have been going there for the longest time and they have excellent Italian food. The owner is the sweetest person ever and you can tell that this restaurant is where her heart is. They have the best St. Louis style pizza — especially the sausage! It’s to die for. This restaurant is a must– visit!

On my first trip to Lou Boccardi’s, they broke every single last one of the 10 commandments of providing good restaurant service:
1. Thou shall not ignore your guests at the hostess station for 10 minutes.
2. Thou shall not sit your guest at a table with a 4-​pronged outlet directly next to their head.
3. Thou shall not have only one employee seating guests, waiting on guests and bussing tables at the same time, making them very unavailable to do any of those jobs well.
4. Thou shall not bus a table by setting all the dirty dishes on the table next to your guests and leave the filth there for your guests to stare at throughout their entire meal.
5. Thou shall not clean tables with Windex. It is designed to make things shiny, not sanitized.
6. Thou shall not fail to divulge upon ordering that you, in fact, have two house dressings and not get huffy when guests send the salad back because it came to the table with a different dressing then what was ordered.
7. When you put the wrong dressing on the salad, thou shall not pour the correct dressing over the wrong dressing and bring the salads right back out.
8. Thou shall not fail to give your guests napkins until their entrees arrive, nor fail to apologize that they were dining without napkins for half of their meal when you do bring them to the table.
9. Thou shall not pass items like napkins or the bill through the divider that separates the bar and the dining area because the server doesn’t want to «squeeze through» other tables to get to their guests.
10. Thou shall not ignore your guests, providing no refills on drinks or the final bill without them having to track you down.
Pizza was delicious but, unfortunately, I have no desire to return. This was the worst service that I have experienced, possibly, ever.

So the three amigos are in STL for the Border Wars Basketball game December 22, 2011 and we head to the «Hill» on a recommendation to try Cunetto’s. Cunetto’s has a 45 minute wait and it is 90 minutes to tip-​off, so we walk across the street to Lou Boccardi’s.
Our first sign should have been that while Cunetto’s was over full, Boccardi’s was empty. Service was lackluster, but the décor was old and stale. We ordered a pizza, a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and another non-​descript entrée. The Pizza was «St Louis Style» which was unique, but not very good and the spaghetti brought back memories of the last time I attended a Boy Scout fundraiser all-​you-​can-​eat dinner.
Avoid this place and generally avoid the «Hill» it is overrated.

Went there for dinner and was very disappointed. Over priced for the small amount served. Definitely not a place for dinner. I got a seafood meal that was supposed to come with salad and a pasta. The salad was skimpy, the fish filet was disgusting and I was charged an extra dollar for a very small dish of white sauced pasta. I should’ve questioned the extra charge, but I didn’t feel like complaining. My husband got a plate of meat sauce mostaccioli, but we couldn’t see any meat in the sauce. When he asked about it, the waitress asked if he would like a meatball. She brought out a meatball the size of a golf ball and charged a dollar extra for that. What a way to correct a complaint.
Definitely a better value for lunch or pizza.

The ratings for Lou Boccardi’s on Unilocal are certainly mixed. I haven’t been in about a year, but I grew up in the St. Louis area and have been there 15 – 20 times, probably. In all those times, I have eaten exactly two things:
1. House salad
2. Pizza
I enjoy many kinds of pizza, but if I want «St. Louis style» I will always choose Lou Boccardi’s. In fact, no matter where I’m at in the city, I’ll drive by 10 Imo’s to make it here. The quality of the ingredients is so much better, particularly the sausage.
The building certainly does look like a bit of a dump, but I think that’s part of it’s character. We have always had excellent service, as the staff always make an effort to engage in conversation with us.
It’s sad to see so many people who truly hated this restaurant. I’ve never had a bad experience there, even when it’s very busy.

We come back to Lou Boccardi’s once in a while for two reasons: 1) They have maybe the best St. Louis style pizza in town and 2) I love their house dressing, which uses celery and… not sure, but I think it’s anchovies. Once again on our last visit, the food didn’t disappoint. Service was very friendly and attentive.
You can usually come here on a Friday or Saturday night and find an open table, even through there are probably only 12 tables in the place. The ambience is very very old school HIll, which an original mural upstairs that is probably from the fifties or sixties. The same artist did the mural at Cusanelli’s in South County, for those of you interested in very obscure St. Louis Italian trivia.
The Boccardi’s have barely put a nickel into upgrading this place since we’re been going there and I’m sure a lot of people trying this place for the first time wonder, as I do, how clean the kitchen is.
Over the years, we only once tried something other than pizza and salad. It was not so good, as I recall, so we never tried again. I get the feeling there aren’t any culinary geniuses on board here. Unless I see some evidence of new management, I’ll probably assume they haven’t improved.
Definitley give it a try if you like St. Louis style Provel-​topped thin crust. I can’t really recommend it for anything else, though.

Hadn’t been to Lou Bocarrdi’s in quite sometime. I remember coming in when the storms of 2006 had downed power to most of the city in the summer and it was one of the few places that was open.
Walking in the place sports a lot of what I would call «character» but others may see as needing «repair». The door has a bar on it but you actually need to use the handle at the bottom to enter. It is a little unnerving attempting to open the door into the bar but it is something I’ll remember in future visits.
Since I was last here I don’t know what exactly changed but the downstairs bar area and dining area seemed brighter and more open. I think there had to have been some work done to the dining area to the right of when you enter because of the paintings and the tables stationed there. I was warned by the waitress that it is quite cooler in that area of the restaurant during the winter months. I guess I really noticed the downstairs dining area because of the window that looks out onto the Southwest/​Magnolia split.
The bar looks like it is from the 30’s or 40’s and is typical for what you would find at most other places in the area. There was one TV in the place located above the bar.
Past the bar when you walk in is a set of stairs and two small rooms with tables which I would consider the main dining area. I don’t think any of the tables are larger than a 4 top which is OK in my book because this restaurant, to me, is more for an intimate setting than for large groups. The walls in the second room have really beautiful mural paintings on them, compound that with the dim lighting it is almost like you are in an old museum.
The menu has something for just about anyone on it and at all different price ranges as well. We started off with some garlic cheese bread. I went with the Tortellini which, all of the pasta dishes and entrees come with a salad and my mother went with the Gnocchi. The salad was a typical Hill restaurant salad served with lots of provel cheese and was very good.
The Tortellini was very good. You have the option of choosing red or white sauce and I took the white. It was very rich and creamy with mushrooms in it. Mom’s Gnocchi was good with the red sauce but she did comment that the shrimp were very tiny in size. I tried a bite and thought it was very tasty aside from the size of the Shrimp.
All in all, the service was excellent and our waitress was very friendly and we even chatted a bit as the place was kind of slow. I definitely will come back because of all of the things on the menu I wanted to try. Based on past experiences I have to say their pizza is also pretty good for a Saint Louis style.

Not at all impressed. I thought the pizza was awful, but the good service and decent atmosphere earned an extra star from me.

This is the best hidden and over looked restaurant on The Hill. I almost hate to Unilocal it for fear that it will be discovered and I will lose my never have to wait for a table place down there.
The restaurant is small and does not offer an extraordinary menu. However, it has all the great Italian fare you could hope for. All the standards are there, like fettucini, lasagna, and an array of pizzas to make your arteries clog, and the salads are delicious and large enough to fill you up, even though it’s just lettuce.
The service is amazing at this place too. I have never had a bad waiter. They are always super friendly and take incredibly good care of you. You will feel compelled to leave a good tip, so just be forewarned.
I have no idea why this place has not been discovered yet, but it has not. I love that. You can always get a table, and you will be seated, given your food, eat your food, feel stuffed to the brim, and be on your way home while you would still be waiting for a table at Zia’s or Cunnetto’s…love that.