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North Beach Pizza: Cheesier Than Elvis in 1975Aug 24 '01 (Updated Aug 30 '01) Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Hey, Italian's an ethnicity, okay. Strictly speaking, pretty much every food has an ethnic origin. So back the f*ck up, white boy, this is where I'm posting. So, sometimes it's just not gonna be the food that gets me to give a place a good review, dammit, and you're all gonna have to understand that. Sometimes it's the convenience and availability that get me to give a place a decent review. Right now, with North Beach Pizza, is one of those times. Let me begin with the highlight: North Beach delivers until FOUR IN THE MORNING, EVERY MORNING. With that, I suppose I could conclude. But for some of you, mere ability to get a pizza when the rest of the city is sleeping is not enough. For you, I will say this: your favorite local pizza place is probably better, but your friends favorite pizza place is worse. And you can't get your favorite local pizza at four in the morning. The Pies North Beach Pizza does not have delicate yet crunchy crust and a thin layer of cheese and crisp pepperoni like your favorite New York style pie shop has. Nor does it have a buttery, corn-mealy thick crust and an abundance of toppings like your favorite Chicago style place. What it has is good quality crust from the basic Domino's school, fine quality toppings and more cheese than an episode of "Joanie Loves Chachi." I'm serious about this. You won't be able to believe how much white stuff this place piles within the confines of a crust edge no more than a half inch high. So if you don't love heavy cheese on your pizza, make sure to tell them. They assume every caller is Chris Farley. Also make sure to tell them if you want your toppings on top of the cheese, because NBP unfathomably loads their toppings between the sauce and the cheese. The result can be pepperoni that is less than crispy, garlic that is a little too acid on the tongue and onions that still have some crunch. My personal favorite is the feta, pesto and pepperoni pizza. We've ordered on average one of these a week for 5 years in this house, between me, Pookster and Pornoboy. One slice is a meal, but the best part of this combo is that it makes a better breakfast than most of the crepe places in my neighborhood. When the cheese has cooled down, this is one, salty-meaty-garlicky-basilly-cheesy-cheesy-delicious mess. Don't hold it against me that I like the crappy food sometimes. North Beach has all the other normal and abnormal toppings you would expect to find in San Francisco, including artichoke hearts, corn, broccoli, zucchini, green onions, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach and eggplant. My favorite part is the list o' meats. In the now infamous words of Nigel Tufnel: "This one (list) goes to eleven." Everything from sausage to linguica to chicken to clams. The large pies start at $12.95, and let's be honest, y'always get the large pie Add $1.40 for each topping. The Rest of The Food North Beach serves a variety of pastas, meat dishes, and salads, none of which are very good. If NBP has perfected the Domino's style pizza, it has also, unfortunately, perfected the McChicken Parmesan recipe it stole from the golden arches. If you must have a pasta dish, North Beach has 28 to choose from: Spaghetti, meat or cheese ravioli, tortellini, gnocchi, lasagna (meat or veggie) and fettuccini, each with a choice of various standard sauces. These run from $6.95 to $11.95 for the fettuccini frutti de mare, with most hovering around the $9.00 range. My experience has been that the pastas are overcooked, rather than al dente, poorly drained and not well sauced. They also serve about a dozen entrees, from eggplant parm to chicken cacciatore to fish filet Milanese, for $9.00 to $12.00. These range from the merely poorly executed to the disgusting. The soups and vegetables that come as side dishes do not deserve discussion. Delivery The "dispachers" at North Beach will tell you that it will be 45 minutes to an hour for you pizza, and most nights they are right. I've rarely gotten my order in less than 45 minutes, and I have occasionally waited much longer. Sometimes they'll tell you when it's going to be an inordinately long wait right when you call, before you place your order, which I think is considerate. But sometimes they won't. A final note on tipping: This relates not so much to the food as your own expectations about getting good service from a place you intend to order from more than once, as well as simple fairness. Delivery drivers are like waiters in that they make next to nothing and live on tips. They are unlike waiters in that they actually have significant expenses while they are working. Most make minimum wage, and some, in spite of the fact that it's against the law, are paid no wages at all, and they can rarely deliver more than two orders per hour. You may find it unreasonable to tip them the 15-20% that you would pay a waiter for good service, but it is equally unreasonable to pay a delivery driver less than $2.00 for a delivery. If somebody offered you $2.00 to get up off your butt, drive to the restaurant, find parking, drive home and find parking again, you wouldn't do it. If you order five or ten pizzas for a large gathering, consider paying them at least 10% of the cost of the pies. That's what they hope for, and they remember you when you don't give it to them. You'll have noone but yourself to blame when your next pizza shows up in two hours and the cheese has slid off the side and solidified there because it's cold. ======================================================================== North Beach Pizza www.northbeachpizza.com 1499 Grant Ave. (Grant @ Union) phone: 415.433.2444  |
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