Best Pizza

It makes us happy that the oldest wood-fired brick oven in San Francisco (built in 1935, when Tommaso's opened as Lupo's, and reportedly the first such oven on the West Coast) turns out the best pizza crust in San Francisco: puffy, crispy, faintly smoky. Whether you prefer toppings of Italian sausage, clams with garlic, meatballs, scallops, tiger prawns, or clams in the shell, this is the crust you want under them. We love the room, too, with creamy-painted wooden booths that remind us more of a '30s-vintage tea room than a pizzeria, despite the charming murals of Italy. Tommaso's (owned by the Cotti family since 1973) has the gastronomic imprimatur of both Francis Ford Coppola, who used to make his own pizzas here before he opened his Cafe Niebaum-Coppola right down the street, and Alice Waters, who famously based her Chez Panisse wood-burning pizza oven on this one.