WaPo shafts Bay Area pizza in national ‘best’ list

The Washington Post recently published an article naming its favorite pizzas around the United States, and not a single Bay Area pizzeria made the list. Even in the California-style pizza category. Blasphemy.

That was great, really, thank you for the recognition. But this pizza roundup by the Washington Post feels like a lazy Yelp ratings grab. It’s unclear how they compiled this list, but they left a lot on the cutting room floor.

The WaPo article is broken down into five categories or regional varieties of pizza — New York slices, Chicago deep dish, Detroit squares, New Haven thin crust and California Neapolitan. In that section, they start off by defining these pies as “pizza dressed up for date night.” You know the type of pizza — soft, chewy crusts cooked at super high temperatures to create charred spots that look like a leopard’s fur. You’ll often see ingredients not commonly known to go on pizza, like stinging nettle, lox or even caviar. They aren’t completely wrong. We have such a bounty of fresh ingredients that we might as well put them on a pizza. Sue us.

WaPo waxes poetic about world-renowned chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and how she influenced Wolfgang Puck to hire her same bricklayer to make an oven for perfectly blistered pies at Southern California’s Spago and bring in San Francisco chef Ed LaDou to run his pizza program. All true. But then WaPo does the unthinkable — or the predictable, depending on your position.

The article goes on to name the publication’s West Coast picks, and out of three pizzerias, only one was in California — Speak Cheezy of Long Beach. None were in the Bay Area, where Alice Waters started the California pizza scene “before it spread across the country.” WaPo drives the knife even deeper with some “Top Rated on Yelp” picks at the bottom, none of which are in the Bay Area. Honestly, this is inexplicable.

We don’t lack good pizza in the Bay Area. We just lack the credit we deserve. In fact, the Bay Area is in the midst of a pizza renaissance. Young stars from impressive culinary backgrounds are making great pizza here. Not necessarily “California-style” pizza, either. In the Tenderloin, Eric Ehler and Peter Dorrance, who met while working together at Mister Jiu’s, are slinging pizza by the slice that rivals some of New York City’s best at Outta Sight Pizza. At Urelio’s, Sam Ciccarelli and Rosie Dooley, who met at Chez Panisse, are driving the streets of the East Bay with an oven on the back of a pickup.

And back in San Francisco, the former culinary director for Tartine, Max Blachman-Gentile, who opened all of the Tartines in Los Angeles and and worked at Roberta’s in New York City, is combining “New York style [and] California sensibility” at Jules. The pop-up, which recently had a residency at Buddy in the Mission, offers pizzas never before seen on Bay Area menus, such as the Bridge and Fennel — fennel cream sauce, fennel sausage, pickled fennel slivers and fennel pollen — or the Drunken Sailor, a cheeseless pie with a white wine tomato sauce, garlic, oregano, capers and anchovies.

So yes, there is great pizza in the Bay Area. Do we care that none of our awesome ‘za was mentioned in a national newspaper? A little. But are we happier that we can keep more for ourselves? Without a doubt.