Uemé
Uemé burst onto the Lecce pizza scene in mid 2022 and as you walk in you feel like wow this place is buzz as fuck. They've really gone for it. It's like an exhibition space for contemporary twenties lighting (two thousand and twenties that is). There's spacious wooden tables, greenery, a fancy bar, different levels of seating, smooth wooden banquets with USB ports, Gen Z music, the entire playbook of the modern venue has been delivered here and its just impossible to ignore.
The reason it's impossible to ignore is that sat inside Uemé, sipping a cocktail and basking in the perfect level of illumination, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in the meatpacking district, or Chelsea, or the lower east side of New York. But you're not. We’re in Lecce. This is a Lecce pizzeria. And Lecce pizzerias are not like this. Or at least they weren't.
La Perla
La Perla is like a microcosm of everything that is fantastic and problematic about Italy all in one place. If you want to have a real traditional Leccese pizza experience I whole heartedly recommend dropping by. It’s amazing, and in its own way, very unique.
The pizza is properly old school rolling-pin disc pizza, with loads of tomato, the right amount of mozzarella, and oregano rather than basil on the Margherita.
400 Gradi
A lot has already been said/written about 400 Gradi online… and with its status as Lecce’s only super-buzz, world-class, neapolitan-pizza-scene pizzeria I won’t lie; it’d be very entertaining to have a go at bursting the bubble. Somehow it feels like the Juve or the Man United or the Real Madrid of Lecce, and lets face it everyone hates those kind of super clubs.
But the thing about 400 Gradi is that unlike Juve/Man United/Real Madrid - it’s actually consistently good. In fact, it’s consistenly excellent.