RESTAURANT NEWS | SAVANNAH
Kyle Jacovino Finally Gets His Pizza and Pasta Bar in Savannah’s Starland Dairy
LUCIA PASTA BAR | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton | 6:25 a.m. ET, June 9, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Kyle Jacovino was supposed to cook inside the old Starland Dairy years ago. The deal fell apart, Pizzeria Vittoria landed around the corner instead, and Savannah waited.
Lucia Pasta Bar brings Jacovino back to the building at last, filling the restored 1930s dairy with an open kitchen, a curved pasta counter, exposed brick, and a whole lot of Art Deco detail. The restaurant sits in the middle of Starland, the neighborhood Jacovino has helped shape since opening Vittoria nearby in 2019.
The food traces a longer path. Jacovino cooked under Linton Hopkins and Hugh Acheson in Atlanta, spent six months learning pizza and pasta in Italy, and later led the kitchens at Five & Ten in Athens and The Florence in Savannah. At Lucia, those years show up in agnolotti with peas, morels, and country ham; squid ink bucatini with crab, scallops, bottarga, and uni butter; and beet scarpinocc filled with chèvre.
Three pizzas come from the original Vittoria oven, moved over for good luck. The rest of the menu ranges from grilled octopus to Jacovino’s grandmother’s steak pizzaiolo, cooked in marinara, topped with mozzarella, and finished in the wood-fired oven.
Bar director Ashley Simeone keeps the drinks firmly in Italy, with negronis on draft, a pistachio-and-Sambuca cocktail called the Sicilian Job, and a wine list devoted entirely to Italian bottles.
Lucia is the restaurant Jacovino had been working toward without knowing exactly when—or where—it would happen. Now the handmade pasta, the old dairy, and a decade of cooking around Savannah have finally landed in the same place.
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