Lady Lake Pizza and Pasta

For more than sixty years, the building at 304 South US Highway 441 housed Mom & Dad’s Restaurant, a fixture so woven into Lady Lake’s history that residents used it as a backdrop for first dates, marriage proposals, and family gatherings that spanned generations. When Mom & Dad’s closed in 2024, it left behind a space with more sentimental weight than most restaurant real estate carries, and it also left the Town of Lady Lake’s planning department fielding questions from a community anxious to know what would come next.

The answer was Lady Lake Pizza and Pasta, opened by Kareem El Shimy, a University of Central Florida graduate who had cut his teeth in restaurant management at La Famiglia Italiana in nearby Sanford before deciding to take on a restaurant of his own. Rather than importing a franchise concept or a generic pizza chain format, El Shimy chose to renovate the existing building and build a menu centered on New York style pizza and pasta dishes, explicitly framed by local coverage as a nod to the community’s appetite for classic, comforting Italian-American food rather than anything experimental.

That approach seems to be working. In its first couple of years, the restaurant built up a solid following, with reviewers specifically praising the lasagna, the garlic knots, and a tiramisu dessert that draws repeat mentions across review platforms. The pizza itself earns comparisons to authentic New York styles, a specific and often hard-to-achieve benchmark for a restaurant located hundreds of miles from Brooklyn, and one that suggests real attention paid to dough and technique rather than a shortcut recipe.

Hours run generously across the week: eleven to nine on weekdays and Sunday, stretching to ten on Friday and Saturday nights, a schedule built to catch both the lunchtime pizza-slice crowd and the Friday night family dinner crowd without much daylight left uncovered. The restaurant operates its own website for ordering and information, giving it a more modern digital footprint than some of its older neighbors along the same stretch of highway.

What makes Lady Lake Pizza and Pasta worth watching is the story behind it: a young, locally committed owner taking over a building loaded with community history and choosing to keep it independently owned rather than flipping it to a franchise operator, a decision the Town’s own growth management office noted with some relief given how much the previous restaurant meant to residents. In a corridor where highway visibility is filled with national chain signage, this small pizza and pasta shop represents a deliberate bet that Lady Lake still wants, and will support, a genuinely local Italian kitchen in a building that has already proven it can hold six decades of memories.