One of the first things guests notice upon entering Sauced Bar & Oven in Little Rock’s West Village is just how many bases the 8-year-old restaurant has covered.
A good, casual lunch? Check. TVs to catch a game? Check. A welcoming and elegant interior that fits both T-shirts and jeans but also coats and ties? A warm and inviting bar? Fresh, locally sourced ingredients? Check, check and check.
“We just wanted a neighborhood restaurant with good food for the locals,” said co-owner Leslie Case, who runs the restaurant with her husband, Kevin.
The food is a good place to start. The lunch and dinner menus for Sauced range from wood-fired pizzas to pasta dishes, sandwiches and more plus an extensive brunch menu that includes favorites such as eggs Benedict, French toast, and even a wood-fired brunch pizza with sausage gravy, eggs, potatoes and more. On top of that, Sauced has one of the best catering operations in the area thanks to a full-fledged mobile pizza oven.
The goal at Sauced has never been to reinvent the wheel — just to be among the best on the local food scene.
“We knew we wanted the pizza,” Case said, “so we got the best pizza oven we could find and brought it over from Italy. That was the main focus initially — just to do a Neapolitan pizza, which has evolved over time based on tastes and everything. The recipe’s changed a little bit for the dough, but the main core recipes have stayed the same for all our pizzas since we opened. The rest of the menu kind of evolved over time.”
Sauced covers all the bases for pizza with high-quality standards such as four-cheese and pepperoni varieties, along with signature selections Margherita, an arugula pizza with prosciutto, and a blackened chicken Alfredo pizza with a creamy Alfredo sauce as its base.
“We just wanted more of a Neapolitan-style pizza that you can make in the wood-fired oven,” Case said, “not a traditional hard-crust pizza like Pizza Hut or whatever.”
The menu at Sauced has never been static. Rather, it is a testament to listening to customers and regulars. For example, Case and the kitchen staff moved away from the by-the-book preparation of those Neapolitan recipes to a crispier crust based on customer feedback.
Likewise, a more formal menu has been altered to also accommodate more casual tastes. The only hard and fast rule at Sauced is that the dishes must be crowd-pleasers made from the best locally sourced ingredients available.
Looking back, Case said the success at Sauced is directly related to the entire restaurant team’s ability to pivot, whether in the kitchen, behind the bar or on the main floor. New ideas are always welcome, but the guidepost has been and always will be customer feedback.
“It’s imperative because your ego can’t be involved,” Case said. “It has to be that way, basically, to survive. You have to be flexible with the market and geared toward what the customers prefer.”
What exists today is a well-loved mainstay of central Arkansas dining and a testament to the Cases’ constant ear toward customer feedback. Any moves made in the future will be just like the changes in the past: always to make the dining experience at Sauced just that much better.
“We’re proud,” Case said. “It’s rewarding that we’ve still been doing well over time. We’re known for being open in the snow and for a lot of the catering we’ve done, like at weddings. We are proud that we’ve been able to maintain it.”
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