On a busy night, more pizzas come out of Jon Felipe's kitchen at Pizza Lucé's Seward/University restaurant than you'll probably ever eat.

So what does he look for in a good pie? Tons of meat or veggies? Red sauce, white sauce, no sauce?

Sorry, trick question: He doesn't look, he listens.

"I like to hear the dough crunch when we cut it," Felipe said. "When I bite into a pizza I like to feel the crunch. That's what I want people to experience."

Toppings matter too, of course. Felipe orders the all the ingredients that go onto the restaurant's 10 gourmet specialty pizzas and five vegetarian pies, including its best-selling Pizza Athena, a Greek-inspired veggie number.

Felipe cuts loose with toppings on the slice line, going off menu to create experimental pies like the puttanesca he made a few weeks ago that involved a spicy red sauce with anchovy base, olives, sausage and cheese.

But good toppings won't fix bad crust, said Felipe, who has been working at Pizza Lucé for 18 months and in restaurant kitchens for eight years.

He traces his love of food, especially the way it can bring family and friends together, to time he spent as a youngster with his grandmother in his native Mexico.

"Food brings back good memories for me," Felipe said. "That naturally led to working in restaurants."

They're interesting. Our location, we have the University, the neighborhood, the hospital, a couple of music venues (Cabooze, Triple Rock), so we get a mix. Mostly 20s and 30s. It's mostly a steady stream. Occasionally there's an incident but nothing serious. Usually we're able to talk them down.

On a Friday night, we'll deliver about 400 pizzas, at least. Two hundred of that being large pizzas. Including the dining room, on a busy night that's up to 600 or 700 pizzas.

You'd want "The Bear." That's all meat: Canadian bacon, chicken, ground beef, pepperoni and sausage (with mozzarella and red sauce). That'll soak up all the alcohol.

Locally, crappie I think would be delicious on a pizza. I might consider something like swordfish or cod. It's pretty hard to mess up cod.