Save up to $300/year on phone billsOff-topic: It costs $482.79 to get a decent pizza in San Francisco
Good, even decent pizza remains my white whale here in SF. And yes, we've tried all of them, cheap or fancy; A16, Delfina, Giorgios, Pizzetta 211, blah, blah, blah. All are mediocre to "acceptably pizza" at best.
One of my pals from NJ is Anthony Mangieri, king of Una Pizza Napoletana on East 12th near 1st ave. I challenge you to find a more delicious pizza anywhere in the US. It's just not going to happen. And I challenge you to find a more dedicated pizza-man than Anthony. He even taught me and the wife how to make pizza at home with flour he got us from Brooklyn. You can read more about his greatness in the NY Times.
But what Anthony offers is more of an artisan product, not a typical slice. You would think that you could get a decent slice of east coast pizza in this town (or anywhere in CA) but it just doesn't seem possible. One theory on the development of a great pizza is the water:
"As you cook, some ingredients vaporize, and these volatilized particles can attach themselves to the walls of the baking cavity," Tisi says. "The next time you use the oven, these bits get caught up in the convection currents and deposited on the food, which adds flavor." Over time, he says, more particles join the mix and mingle with the savory soot from burned wood or coal -- the only fuels worth using -- to create a flavor that you can't grow in a garden: gestalt, if you will.
I buy the water argument to a point--that point is where I bring up Shaka Pizza on Maui. Shaka is owned by a couple of guys from the Jersey Shore and their pizza is damn-near east coast.
In light of this posting, we're going to go make some dough and rock out tonite. Joe Brown, from Wired, you are invited anytime.
Dave Rosenberg is currently working on a new stealth start-up based in San Francisco. He is Co-founder of MuleSource, an open source integration and infrastructure software company and is a recognized thought-leader in open source software and service-oriented architecture. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Alas, I have one minor quibble with your post. While there are many fine pizzerias in NY, they simply don't rise to the same level of greatness as demonstrated by Pepe's, Sally's and Modern Apizza in New Haven, CT. Of course, I'm not surprised that those in New York can't bring themselves to recognize that the best of anything resides outside of their great city, so we New Havenites can share our great secret, occasionally sharing with those willing to learn ;)