The Panna and Sausage pizza ($13) at Pizzeria Delfina is known to some as the Magic Pie*. It gets topped with a raw tomato sauce, pork sausage, ribbons of Parmigiano, and a few leaves of basil, but the 'magic' ingredient is cream. Yes, you read that correctly—about thirty seconds before it comes out of the oven, the pizzaiolo splashes this pizza with a bit of cream that intermingles with the tomato and forms a thin layer of bright orange liquid at the center of the pie. Along with the fennely, lightly spicy sausage, the cream adds a richness to the sauce. This sauce would kill on a pasta (think vodka sauce minus the vodka), but it also works brilliantly on top of the pizza—I enlisted my end-crust to sop up every last droplet of the neon liquid that had spilled onto my plate. More

No, this isn't a story ripped from the daily crime blotter. I'm talkin' about Pizza Madness, the 64-pizzeria, nationwide slice-off conducted by Adam Kuban and Ed Levine, and the indefensible and inexplicable defeat of Pizzaiolo of Oakland at the hands of San Francisco's Delfina. More

And my documentation of Pizza Madness 2009 continues. Here, I'm just going to roll up my San Francisco leg into one post, since A) I had trouble getting photos in some of these darkened joints and B) this is where the Neapolitan pies really started to blur together. —The Mgmt. View Pizza Madness 2009, San Francisco Leg in a larger map As I said in an earlier post documenting "Pizza Madness 2009," I knew Seattle and San Francisco were going to kick my pizza-eating ass. I was well-prepared for San Francisco going in, since I've now visited the city a... More

View West Coast Pizza Tour in a larger map [All photographs by Adam Kuban unless noted] I know it's taken me a while to get the lead out re this trip. I've been back in NYC for six days after 12 days total on the road (nine actual pizza-eating days among those). I figured that regular Slice readers might want the skinny on which places I visited while out west. They're above in the map, but I'll also list them below, after the jump.... More

"I would be happy eating a Delfina pizza every day of my life, but it probably would never make me jump for pizza joy." Pizzeria Delfina is Alan Richman's No. 3 U.S. pizzeria. Last week I took advantage of a quick-turnaround, 36-hour trip to San Francisco to try a couple of much-ballyhooed San Francisco pizzerias, Pizzeria Delfina and Gialina. San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer took me to Gialina (many thanks, Michael) and I took myself to Pizzeria Delfina because, well, because that's what I do--try pizzerias near and far. And much to Mr. Kuban's chagrin, Mr. Bauer blogged... More

Chicago Upstart Great Lake Has Country's Best Pizza Alan Richman (left) and Lucali proprietor-pizzaiolo Mark Iacono (right) hold a copy of the June 2009 issue of "GQ" in front of Iacono's Lucali (the No. 2 pizza in the U.S.) at press event celebrating the story's May 19 publication. The issue contains Richman's "American Pie," a list of the top 25 pizzerias in the country. In the June issue of GQ, food writer extraordinaire Alan Richman ranks the top 25 pizzas in the U.S. after visiting what he considers the top 10 pizza cities in the country. The story is much... More

pizzeriadelfina.com For a city with a historic and world-renown Italian community (North Beach), San Francisco and the Bay Area has, until the last few years, been sorely lacking in great pizza. While there are several excellent Italian delis and restaurants like Molinari's, Lucca, and, my favorite restaurant when I lived in San Francisco in the '80s, Caffe Sport, no pizzaioli were creating memorable pies. Thankfully, that woeful state of culinary affairs has been remedied. One of a handful of great purveyors of pizza is Pizzeria Delfina. Opened by Craig and Ann Stoll on 18th Street in the Mission in... More

7x7 San Francisco's Pizzeria Delfina has come up with a brilliant way of countering negative reviews from less-than-literate Yelpers—it simply prints the nasty reviews on its employees' T-shirts. 7x7, which first reported on the shirts, makes a great analogy—it's sort of like taking back the night. Or, perhaps a better comparison would be in the way that minority groups attempt to reclaim certain derogatory terms—queer, nigga, bitch—from the dominant culture, thereby mitigating the sting of those words. With messages such as "The pizza was soooo greasy. I am assuming this was in part due to the pig fat" (natalie... More

A Margherita pie from the original Pizzeria Delfina location in the Mission District of San Francisco. Michael Bauer just dropped a review of the new Pacific Heights location. The San Francisco Chronicle's food critic, Michael Bauer, visits the Pacific Heights offshoot of Pizzeria Delfina. (The original Pizzeria Delfina is in the Mission District, where it opened three years ago next door to its progenitor, Delfina.) I had some great pizza at the Mission Pizzeria Delfina not too long ago, but Bauer's criticism—that it's inconsistent—echoes that of many of my pizza spies. Bauer says: After my first visit, when I... More