Few chefs are as critically acclaimed as Joshua Skenes, who earned three Michelin stars at his San Francisco restaurant, Saison. Skenes has gone on to open other successful restaurants and will now open one with pizza on the menu: Leopardo, in Los Angeles.
The restaurant will feature many things, including Tokyo-inspired Neo-Neapolitan pizza, writes Eater Los Angeles. In fact, Skenes told Eater he calls the pizza “neo-Minato,” which is apparently a reference to pizza found in the Minato neighborhood of Tokyo.
According to Eater, Skenes and his culinary team spent countless hours developing hundreds of iterations of pizza before settling on the style that will be on the menu at Leopardo. The pizza also features Skenes’ typical dedication to high-quality ingredients, which in this case includes artisan flour with “full wild fermentation but isn’t aged to the point of being sour.” The dough is high in hydration, as you might expect for a puffy, Neapolitan pie.
“The gluten is beautifully gelatinized, and the crust very light despite being very big,” Skenes told Eater. “You could put a whole pie away yourself. And it retains sweetness because it doesn’t become a sourdough, despite long fermentation.”
There are other areas where Leopardo separates itself from your average pizza restaurant, though. The menu includes a $220 dish featuring caviar, polenta waffle, and whatever barbecue maple syrup is. The menu also includes a cold noodles dish featuring fermented tomato broth. That one is served in a “hallowed-out sea urchin shell.”
“We want to use incredible local products that nobody uses, like the ocean tilefish,” Skenes told Eater. “It’s so delicious and craveable—we just treat it really well with good buttery olive oil, lemon, salt, seasoning.”
In other words, Leopardo will very much be the work of a singular chef. It’s a safe bet the pizza won’t be too bad. But will the average pizza lover be able to afford to eat there?