#21 Pizza Margherita at Pizzeria Delfina

One of the restaurants I’ve been wanting to try for a long time has been Delfina. Delfina has been known to be one of San Francisco’s best Italian restaurants. However, the issue is the long wait and hard-to-get reservations for the place. So when I decided to have our once-a-year dinner with Kevin, Tina, and Amy, I’d thought I throw out the idea of going to the Mission…to Delfina….on a Friday night…with no reservations…

Well, as you can guess no luck unless we wanted to wait until 10pm to eat. We were all hungry so that idea was quickly thrown out. But next door to Delfina is Pizzeria Delfina, which luckily only had a 15 minute wait. I can deal with that. Pizzeria Delfina is a tiny operation serving pizza out of the wood fire ovens. Classically, Italian pizza has a thin crust topped with only a couple simple and fresh ingredients. Pizzeria Delfina definitely delivers. We decided to start off with an asparagus and pancetta appetizer to hold us over until the main event. With 4 hungry people, we figured three pizzas would be good. We ordered the Margherita (of course), a Purgatorio, and a Panna. The Margherita came out first. What a way to start off dinner. The crust was thin and crunchy. There was the right amount of tomato sauce. The simple oven-charred basil and melted, gooey mozzarella. It was awesome. The simplicity and quality of the ingredients definitely made the dish. That’s the type of pizza that I now crave for. Even now, I’m wanting a slice. We finished off the margherita pretty quickly but fortunately, the other two pizzas quickly followed.

I’ll start off with the Panna first. Following the margherita is pretty tough. It was such a good pizza, I think the Panna would had to been exceptionally good now that our expectations were so high. Unfortunately the Panna fell a little short. It was definitely good. The crust was thin and crunchy, just like the Margherita. There was the right amount of tomato sauce, just like the Margherita. However, instead of the melted, gooey mozzarella, the Panna replaced that with cream. It just felt like the cream weighed the pizza down. I can’t describe it well but it just wasn’t quite there.

On the other hand, the Purgatorio blew me away! It’s probably because in the words of Anthony Bourdain, “I’m a total egg slut.” The Purgatorio was topped with mozarella, almost-runny egg yolks, and large shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano. All I can say is it was pretty damn good.

Bonus: Picture of Amy and Tina. Not sure why they pretended like they didn’t see me trying to take their picture!