Serious Eats' Seriously Skewed Look at Bay Area Pizza

By John Birdsall, SFoodie Editor Mon., Apr. 19 2010 at 5:37 PM

Categories: Doggy Bag

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Deep-dish slice from Zachary's: Representative of local pizza?

Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Pie freak: Serious Eats' Adam Kuban pulled off another wonderfully OCD examination of Bay Area pizza this weekend, part of his 50-part, map-crawling United States of Pizza series. First, a Kuban caveat that reveals just how fecund our restaurant pizza culture has become:

I'm not even going to pretend that this is a comprehensive list of all the Northern California pizzerias worthy of your attention. The rate at which new places are opening there and the geographic vastness make this a crazy undertaking, to be sure.

What follows (with the help of fellow blogger L.A. Pizza Maven) is a 10-taste of mostly S.F. and East Bay pies. We think Kuban's likes have an inevitable New York flavor (NYC-style Arinell, Gioia, and Pizza My Heart get top-of-the-column love), Chicago-style Zachary's and Little Star get sizable column inches, while Pizzaiolo, Boot and Shoe, and Delfina are sort of L.A. Pizza Maven add-ons (Gialina and Pizzetta 211 don't even rate mentions). Even the term ingredient-driven is quarantined in quote marks, as if it were a quaint, or even kooky notion. Still, we like the fact that Kuban shared his obsession with us, even if they reveal an outsider's peccadillos.

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