{"id":290811,"date":"2026-04-29T03:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T03:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/290811\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T03:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T03:36:10","slug":"tony-gemignani-and-the-rise-of-world-class-pizza-in-the-bay-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/290811\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Gemignani and the rise of world-class pizza in the Bay Area"},"content":{"rendered":"

For years, California suffered from a reputation as a pizza desert. Having grown up in an East Coast family with roots in Naples, I was keenly aware of the deficit when my parents moved us West.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just different out here. We still had great pizza,\u201d says Tony Gemignani, the world pizza champion who grew up in southern Alameda County. \u201cBut you had to really know where to find it. It wasn\u2019t on every corner.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Gemignani was one of two chefs, both of whom honed their craft in the East Bay, who were pivotal figures in the West Coast pizza revolution. The other, as with many things culinary, was Alice Waters.<\/p>\n

The Bay Area, as a result, is no longer a pizza backwater. Gemignani helped establish it as one of the craft\u2019s leading outposts when he became the first American to win the World Pizza Cup crown in Naples, Italy. He has won 13 world pizza titles and been called the Michael Jordan of dough tossing.<\/p>\n

Since becoming America\u2019s best known pizzaiolo, Gemignani has designed a pizza pin bearing his name and lent his brand to a premium pizza flour, while resisting commoditization beyond core craft essentials.<\/p>\n

Gemignani, who spoke with us on a recent Tuesday, opened Tony\u2019s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco\u2019s North Beach district in 2009 and soon began selling pizza by the slice at a storefront next door to it.<\/p>\n

The outgrowth of that enterprise is Tony\u2019s Slice House, a fast-expanding franchise which continued with an Oracle Park location in 2010, followed by Market Street and Haight Street locations in 2016, as well as a Walnut Creek shop the same year. A location at Chase Center opened in 2019; a San Leandro shop opened in 2021.<\/p>\n

His Slice House restaurant in Haight Ashbury will participate in Bay Area Pizza Week<\/a> through May 3, a promotion organized by the Weeklys Media Group.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>VARIETY Gemignani\u2019s pizza ovens embrace multiple regional varieties: New York, Sicilian, Detroit and \u2018Grandma style.\u2019 (Photo by Raymond R. Rodriguez Jr.)<\/p>\n

Like most things remixed in California, pizza\u2019s culinary trajectory was bent when Waters installed a woodburning oven and added pizzas to the menu at Berkeley\u2019s Chez Panisse. That led to the rise of artisanal pizza, with ingredients like nettles, figs and goat cheese.<\/p>\n

Waters\u2019 addition of pizza to a fine dining menu prompted Wolfgang Puck to bring the Italian working class people\u2019s food to Hollywood\u2019s Spago restaurant and give it a celebrity veneer\u2014with dill-infused cr\u00e8me fra\u00eeche, caviar and smoked salmon.<\/p>\n

Gemignani has done the opposite, devolving the pretense of street eats as haute cuisine. He appreciates that not everyone wants to invest time or spend money for sit-down dinners, and doesn\u2019t need a full bar or table service. Hence the concept of a refined product in a fast-casual environment.<\/p>\n

Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya\u2019s three-volume opus, Modernist Pizza, credits Gemignani with championing a return to authenticity by embracing both Neapolitan purism and Italian American urban traditions. Along with an emphasis on temperature and technique, Gemignani fires his pies in coal-, wood- and electric-burning ovens\u2014and even worked with a manufacturer to design a triple-stacked oven that fits six large pizzas on each deck. \u201cWe do 20-inch rounds. That\u2019s our biggest pizza,\u201d Gemignani says. \u201cI designed it so it could do 18 20\u2019s at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than simply focus on one style of pie, Gemignani serves several U.S. regional varieties that grew in popularity after returning servicemen sampled different styles of pizza during their tours of duty in Europe. So, along with thin-crust, New York-style slices, there are thicker-crusted Sicilian style rectangles, a square pan \u201cGrandma-style\u201d pizza and a Detroit-style square pizza.<\/p>\n

The focus on basics has served as a foundation for\u2014rather than a filter of\u2014innovation. Brightly colored purple potato slices garnish a signature dish at the Slice House.<\/p>\n

Gemignani credits the easy access to ingredients through online platforms, the proliferation of plug-and-play backyard ovens and a more educated consumer audience as factors in pizza\u2019s accelerating popularity. \u201cYou have equipment. You have ingredients. You have procedures. There\u2019s almost too much information now online. There\u2019s way more than there was when I started 37 years ago. There were only like a couple of books about pizza,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He continues: \u201cYou\u2019re able to make really great restaurant-quality pizza at home. And I think that that\u2019s exciting. The funny thing is, well, has that [negatively] affected the pizza business? Not for me. I\u2019ve been growing. I\u2019ve written books. I\u2019ve done a lot of podcasts. I\u2019ve answered a lot of questions about making great pizza at home. I think the whole craft is elevated.\u201d<\/p>\n

The easy access to knowledge, ingredients and technology has coincided with the growth of craft varieties at Bay Area restaurants. From Roman to Saint Louis style, you can get pretty much any style of pizza in the Bay Area.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was never like that 30 years ago\u2014or even 20 years ago,\u201d Gemignani says. \u201cIt\u2019s really evolved, and it\u2019s great. It\u2019s not just good pizza, it\u2019s great pizza, and you can find it up and down the peninsula and all over now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, California suffered from a reputation as a pizza desert. Having grown up in an East Coast…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[124121,143,145,144],"class_list":["post-290811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-east-bay-chefs","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}