Last month, I had the opportunity to have dinner at Pizzaiolo’s Wood Fired Pizza in Oakland with my friend Jeff Varasano. For those of you who don’t know Jeff, he has become somewhat infamous for reverse-engineering Patsy’s pizza and has a single-page website with all kinds of details about how to make great pizza. He was recently featured in the NYTimes Dining and Wine section. His hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution also published an article about him.
In addition to my brother and me, Jeff had invited another dozen or so pizza afficionados from the Bay Area. Many of the people at the table had been making pizza using Jeff’s recipe for several years. They had interesting stories to tell of how they went about making pizza at home, such as by using a modified bbq grill.
We enjoyed the pizza at Pizzaiolo very much. Jeff ordered many of the pizzas on the menu and we tried pizzas with an assortment of different toppings. As usual with neopolitan pizza, my favorite turned out to be the margherita pizza. As we were eating our way through our fifth or six piece, owner Charlie Hallowell came over, introduced himself to the table, and chatted with Jeff. Apparently Charlie is aware of Jeff’s pizza page and wanted to make sure that Jeff knew him too.
Later in the evening, the discussion turned to other great pizza places in the bay area. The person next to me mentioned that he thought the best pizza in San Francisco is a place named Pizzeria Delfina, located on 18th street in the Mission. I’m planning on checking it out the next time that I go to the city.
Update: Jeff just sent me an email after seeing this blog and told me to skip Delfina.
Tags: margherita, Pizza, pizzaiolo, varasano