Pizza Luce - Downtown, Uptown, Seward Minneapolis and St. Paul

Great pizza paired with the coolest local beers served in their hipster restaurants, or delivered to select areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Pizza Luce's retro-modern restaurants with bars, four in the Twin Cities, serve pizza from late morning until late into the night. The beers are Midwestern craft favorites like Surly, Summit and Bells, so they can pick their brews, but how is the pizza?

Pizza Luce serves "gourmet pizza" which means pizza with unexpected ingredients (like mock duck). I want to knock Pizza Luce for excessive playing around with a winning formula. Pizza is cheese, meat, vegetables, tomato sauce. What more do you want? Odd gourmet pizzas bother me because pizza is plain good the way it is.

Pizza Luce feels differently and has come up with a hybrid of pizza and Midwestern stodge. The Baked Potato pizza is a pizza, topped with garlic mashed potatoes, cheese, broccoli and bacon. Huh? But it's carbohydrate heaven. I suggest this one if you've just been on a six-mile run or spent the day moving house.

There's a Pizza Lupe, with Mexican-style ingredients, plenty of very Italian pizzas, and their own take on the meat lovers and veggie lovers pizzas that every pizza place offers. It's all good.

Hoagies, pasta, desserts and weekend brunch expand their appeal - handy when you are with a group and there's one of those odd people who don't like pizza.

Delivery is timely. They get busy, especially at the weekend, so call well before you get hungry. But when they say that your pizza will be delivered in 45 minutes, that's what they mean. Service in the restaurants can be patchy - for example, drinks fetched in seconds, food takes forever - and sometimes leaves guests wondering if they've been forgotten about. Pizza Luce is not for those in a hurry. But if you are in a hurry and are going to bolt down your pizza without tasting it, you have options like always-ready Little Caesars. When you have a little more time to enjoy your pizza, Pizza Luce's food can do no wrong.