Una Pizza Napoletana

Since April or so, I’ve been volunteering at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in their archives. I’ve spent most of my Wednesdays since then driving about halfway up the peninsula to San Bruno, parking my car, taking the BART into the city, walking to SFCM, working, then reversing that trip (often doubling the trip length due to rush hour). Today, however, a new era began in which Tessa (a.k.a. archivist extraordinaire) and I decided to come to work later and treat ourselves with dinner and drinks after working. After all, we’re volunteers in a city renowned as a foodie’s haven, so we deserve some fun, right?

A quick look on Yelp resulted in the most fabulous find: Una Pizza Napoletana is only a .3 mile walk from SFCM and had already been on my radar (thanks to my pizza connoisseur friends). Well, yum. You walk into this place and it’s not too long until you realize that this place is about pizza and pizza only. Well, and drinks. Pretty nice drinks. But mostly about the pizza.

The minimalist restaurant centers around the most beautiful, turquoise-tiled, wood-burning pizza oven and Anthony Mangieri’s steady rhythm of pizza-making (three pizzas in the oven at a time). The food on the menu consists of five pizzas, with a total of ten ingredients between them (including sea salt and olive oil). So it’s not much of a stretch to believe that all five might be excellent. We had the Margherita (the salt, basil, and buffalo mozzarella really just make it sublime) and the Ilaria (smoked mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, and baby arugula sprinkled over the top of the piping hot pizza) which, as Tessa put it, “was the perfect combination of flavors.” The sea salt on both pizzas really just pushed the flavors over the top. The crust was a bit thicker and fluffier than most Neapolitan pizza I’ve had, but it was excellent and moist, with big, crusty bubbles from the hot wood-fired oven.

I can’t help contrasting this place with Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, which has an overwhelmingly large and detailed menu (complete with the type of dough, temperature of each oven, origin of ingredients…you get the picture) and spectacular pizza. I admit that my hips would probably prefer it if Una Pizza had a salad on the menu (half a pizza between two of us would have been too little on its own, but two pizzas was probably a tad too much). I guess I’ll just have to try both places a few more times before I can justify picking a favorite, though.