Best vegetarian pizzas in Louisville

This one is easy. That’s because the best pizzerias for vegetarians are also the four best pizzerias, period.

The Post

The Post ripped into Louisville about four years ago with an unbeatable formula: excellent pizza at affordable prices and off street parking. The restaurant took over a veteran’s post and has incorporated that legacy into its name, logo, and menu items.

My go-to pizza is the Victory Garden, named after backyard gardens of WW II when food shortages were a thing. Before you even take a bite, you are dazzled by the array of colors on your plate. There’s a rainbow of identifiable colors on this pizza: the red and green bell peppers and black olives establish a veritable color wheel.

The crime partner says this is the best pizza in Louisville. And he holds a degree from the Culinary Institute of America and thirty years’ experience in professional kitchens.

The dough is perfect, all the vegetables are cooked fresh. The sauce scores a goal.

The Post features two other vegetarian pizzas, the Mediterranean and a traditional Margherita pizza which they have dubbed “the Italian campaign.”

(The crime partner claims that any pizzeria’s worth can be accurately measured only by its ability to create a tasty Margherita, which is always a confection of pizza dough, mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil. Add anything to that, you’re cheating. It’s not a Margherita.

So if you want to test that theory, order the Italian campaign.)

My waitress notes that neither the cheese, nor the crust, at the Post is vegan. The crust is made with honey. Whether or not vegetarians should support bee keeping will be another blog.

We usually preface our pizza with a field greens salad which is always a slam dunk of greens that taste and look like they were picked today.

Boombozz

If you cannot face a pizza without a dazzling choice of craft beers, Boombozz will be your pizzeria.

Like the Post, Boombozz features an always vegetarian Margherita as well as a Portobello pizza and my go-to, the farmers market.

The farmers market is a riot of color and fresh veggies that combine to create an orgasm for the taste buds. For those of us sensitive to the appearance of our food, the colors are also highly appealing.

Boombozz is also offering a cauliflower crust option. I had quite a battle getting the crime partner (something of a purist and pizza snob) to try it.

After a few bites, he conceded that it was crisp, tasty, and not really missing anything integral to a pizza. It actually comes pretty close to that super-thin New York style crust that some pizza snobs believe to be the gold standard.

And it would be wrong, deceitful, in fact, not to mention the fresco margarita, made on the spot with three pieces of whole fruit and tequila.

I swing around to Boombozz for one of these confections every week or two. It’s indisputably vegetarian and has never failed to provide a nice, sedating pat on the head.

Both Boombozz and the Post state they are working on getting vegan cheese as a menu option. Check back with LouisvilleVegetarian.com for updates.

Coals Artisan Pizza

The true pizza literati might tell you that Coals has the best pizza. Coals has put a LOT of time and thought into its formula of coal-fired ovens and high-protein dough. The result is a seriously classy pizza.

Coals is a little out of my day-to-day budget. But every time we go there, it turns into a special occasion, whether it started out as one or not. If you need to pair your pizza with a really good wine, this will be your pizzeria.

In addition to the ubiquitous Margherita, Coals offers a vegetarian “Prospect” pizza which combines spinach, feta, olives, artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and garlic. They also serve a white pizza, the “Bardstown,” that features mascarpone and ricotta as well as mushrooms, garlic, and caramelized onions. Most Coal pizzas are named after neighborhoods.

(And the menu is amazingly free of typos, an achievement when the menu features really fancy Italian ingredients.)