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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.
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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.
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