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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.
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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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