Pizzeria Delfina

Appears on

• Top 6 Pizza in San Francisco

  Currently #3 · score 0

Reviews

Log in to leave a review.

Barks

Log in to bark.

Similar places

• Tony's Pizza Napoletana

  Tony's Pizza Napoletana opened on Stockton Street in North Beach in 2009, founded by Tony Gemignani, a pizzaiolo who'd already spent nearly two decades in the pizza world before opening his own restaurant. Gemignani built Tony's around an unusually ambitious premise for a single restaurant: rather than committing to one regional style, the kitchen runs multiple specialized ovens side by side, each dedicated to a different pizza tradition, letting the restaurant serve genuine Neapolitan, Roman, and other styles without compromising any single one of them. That multi-oven, multi-style approach is the whole identity of the place — Tony's isn't trying to be the best version of one kind of pizza, it's trying to be a legitimate showcase of several kinds at once, an approach that requires real technical range across styles most pizzerias never attempt to master even one of. TripAdvisor rated it among the top handful of pizzerias in the entire United States, and it's regularly cited among San Francisco's essential pizza destinations by local food press. Gemignani's own reputation as a competitive pizzaiolo — with a genuine record in international pizza competitions — gives Tony's a level of technical credibility that's rare for a restaurant of its kind, and it shows up directly in the kitchen's insistence on getting each style's specific dough, oven temperature, and technique right rather than treating "pizza" as a single undifferentiated category. That range, paired with a North Beach setting in one of San Francisco's oldest Italian-American neighborhoods, makes Tony's Pizza Napoletana less a single-style specialist and more a genuine survey course in pizza tradition, all under one roof. For a San Francisco pizza list, Tony's is the essential "master class in every style" entry — a North Beach kitchen built by a competitive pizzaiolo who refused to pick just one regional tradition to specialize in.

• Golden Boy Pizza

  Golden Boy Pizza opened on Green Street in North Beach in 1978, founded by Peter Sodini around a style genuinely distinctive to San Francisco: thick, focaccia-style squares topped and baked more like a Sicilian pan pizza than a conventional thin round pie. The format caught on fast — Golden Boy became, in short order, "the place to be" in North Beach, eventually expanding to as many as seven locations across San Francisco and Berkeley along with a wholesale business supplying delis and schools. The pizza itself is built on a thick, chewy, olive-oil-brushed crust with a genuinely bready structure under the sauce and cheese — a meaningfully different eating experience from the thin, foldable slices most San Francisco pizzerias serve, closer to a proper focaccia than to a typical New York or Neapolitan pie. It's sold by the thick square slice, cash-friendly and fast, built for late-night North Beach foot traffic as much as for a sit-down meal. Sodini eventually scaled the business back from its multi-location peak, but he kept the original Green Street flagship running, and it's since passed to his sons, who've kept the format essentially unchanged while recently expanding again with a new Sunset District location — evidence the format still has real demand outside its original North Beach neighborhood. Close to fifty years in the same Green Street storefront, run across two generations of the same family, serving a thick focaccia-style square that's stayed genuinely distinct from the thin-crust and Neapolitan pizza dominating much of the rest of San Francisco's scene, makes Golden Boy a real North Beach institution rather than just a late-night novelty. For a San Francisco pizza list, Golden Boy Pizza is the essential "thick, focaccia-style square" entry — a dive-y, cash-fast North Beach counter that's been serving the same distinctive format since 1978.

• Little Star Pizza

  Little Star Pizza built its reputation in San Francisco on a style the city otherwise has little of: proper Chicago-style deep-dish, with a thick, cornmeal-flecked crust holding up a hefty layer of cheese and chunky tomato sauce spooned over the top rather than tucked underneath. In a pizza scene dominated by thin crusts and Neapolitan-leaning kitchens, Little Star carved out a specific, durable niche as one of the only places locals reliably point to for genuine deep-dish. The build follows deep-dish convention closely — a pan-baked, high-edged crust, a generous cheese layer, and the reverse-order sauce placement that separates true deep-dish from a merely thick pizza — served as a substantial, fork-and-knife order rather than a quick handheld slice. That commitment to getting the format right, rather than offering deep-dish as a novelty option on a broader thin-crust menu, is what's kept the concept credible with people who've actually had the real thing in Chicago. The company has since grown into a small regional group operating under both the Little Star and The Star Pizza names, with locations spread across the Bay Area and into Portland, Oregon, while keeping the San Francisco outpost on Valencia Street as one of its most established addresses. That expansion, built entirely on a style genuinely uncommon to Northern California, speaks to how well the format has traveled beyond its Chicago origins. For a city with no shortage of thin-crust specialists, having a kitchen fully committed to the opposite extreme gives San Francisco's pizza scene real range rather than just variations on the same thin, blistered format. For a San Francisco pizza list, Little Star Pizza is the essential "the deep-dish outlier" entry — a thick, cornmeal-crusted, reverse-layered pie that's stayed the city's most reliable answer to genuine Chicago-style pizza.

• Arinell Pizza

  Arinell Pizza's San Francisco location on Valencia Street operates as a sister shop to the original Arinell, which Ron Demirdjian opened in Berkeley in 1975 after training under an Italian pizza-maker in upper Manhattan and concluding that nobody in the Bay Area was making real New York-style pizza. The Mission District location has carried that same format and reputation across the bay, becoming, in its own right, one of San Francisco's most reliably cited cult-favorite pizza-by-the-slice spots. The pizza itself is unapologetically New York in style — large, thin, foldable slices sold fast and cheap, cooked with minimal fuss and served without much in the way of decor or ceremony. It's the kind of counter that trades entirely on the quality of the slice rather than atmosphere, a genuine dive in the best sense: bare-bones, inexpensive, and built for speed rather than a sit-down experience. That format has made Arinell a specific late-night and post-bar staple in the Mission, the kind of place regulars duck into for a quick, reliable slice rather than plan a meal around. Nearly fifty years after the Berkeley original opened on the belief that authentic New York pizza simply didn't exist yet in the Bay Area, the Mission location has helped prove that belief right by building its own loyal following on the same basic conviction. The shop's continued commitment to a classic, unfussy New York slice — no gourmet toppings, no elevated presentation, just a well-made thin crust sold fast — has let it hold its own against flashier, more expensive competitors for decades. For a San Francisco pizza list, Arinell Pizza is the essential "no-frills New York slice" entry — a thin, foldable, cheaply priced pie from a dive counter that's been proving Demirdjian's original thesis right since the 1970s.

• A16

  A16 opened on Chestnut Street in the Marina in 2004, named after the Autostrada dei Due Mari, the Italian highway connecting Puglia and Campania — a fitting reference for a restaurant built specifically around Southern Italian cooking and Neapolitan pizza rather than the more generalized "Italian" menus common at the time. The name signals exactly what the kitchen set out to do: import a very specific regional tradition rather than a broad, Americanized version of it. The pizza program follows Vera Pizza Napoletana standards closely, built on San Marzano tomatoes, careful dough fermentation, and the thin, char-blistered crust that defines true Neapolitan pizza when it's done right. That commitment to VPN technique, combined with a broader Southern Italian menu built around burrata, house-cured meats, and a serious Italian wine list, gave A16 a level of regional specificity that was still fairly rare in San Francisco pizza when the restaurant opened. A16 has since expanded to additional locations across the Bay Area and beyond, including outposts in Oakland, the Ferry Building, Napa, and even Tokyo and Yokohama — genuinely unusual international reach for a restaurant that started as a single Marina storefront built around one specific stretch of Italian highway and the food culture along it. That the original Chestnut Street restaurant has held onto its VPN-certified technique and Southern Italian focus through two decades of growth and international expansion says something about how deliberately built the concept was from the start, rather than loosely themed around "Italian" as a catch-all category. For a San Francisco pizza list, A16 is the essential "regionally specific Neapolitan" entry — a VPN-certified crust and a genuinely focused Southern Italian menu, anchoring the upscale end of the city's pizza scene since 2004.