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The Best Pizza in San Francisco

Quick Link to Results

Finding the best pizza in San Francisco was a ton of fun, and you can read the whole story below. But if you just want to see the results, you can scroll to the bottom of this page.

You can also see the full pizza scoring data, or skip to the final Best Pizza in San Francisco video if you like.

The story

In 2019, I made video about San Francisco that went viral. I made some bold claims in the video, one of them being that you can’t find a decent slice of New York-style pizza here in SF.

Here’s the original video (Over 180,000 views):

Some local San Francisco publications (SFist, Broke Ass Stuart) got wind of the video, and it earned a ton of attention (including a lot of crazy comments from crusty SF locals).

Dude Who’s Lived in San Francisco for 1 Year Makes Video About What SF is “Really Like”

Overall, the reception was really positive, but people really took issue with my claim that you can’t get a decent slice of pizza in SF. Man, people really love their pizza. Lots of viewers chimed in to say I didn’t go to visit their favorite pizza places, and that I missed some great ones.

So I got online to try and find a good pie…and the internet let me down. Yes, there are lots of articles about the “best slice of pizza in San Francisco”, but to be honest, they’re pretty much all just unranked lists written by a single person, with unclear judging criteria.

That’s when it hit me: this city needs someone to step up and find the real best slice of pizza in San Francisco.

But I couldn’t do it alone.

So I set out with a ragtag band of pizza experts and SF personalities on a one-day mission to find the absolute best slice of pizza in San Francisco. 

How we did it

We had a panel of 5 judges. I sampled all the pizzas too, but didn’t do any scoring or judging myself. The point was to have a panel of people where no one can say we were biased or just giving one guy’s opinion.

Everyone piled into an UberXL on a Saturday, and we headed out to taste the top-rated pizza places in San Francisco. We gave off-the-cuff commentary on camera, but also scored each slice on a standard rubric (sauce, crust, value, flavor…etc).

The finished video ended up being a funny but authoritative guide for anyone who likes pizza in San Francisco and wants to know the unequivocal “best slice in town”.

Methodology

Here’s how I determined the 6 best pizzerias to judge:

  • Searched Google for “best pizza in san francisco” to find 11 existing “Best Pizza in San Francisco” lists from a variety of publications
  • Added up the number of times each pizzeria appeared on a list to get a Top 3
  • To ensure newer pizzerias weren’t underrepresented, I worked with 2 San Francisco pizza fanatics who agreed on 3 additional pizzerias that should be considered.

We sampled all 6 pizzerias in a single day (Saturday, Nov 16th), rating each pizza using a standard scoring system. 

The Rules

Here’s how the pizza scoring worked…

At each location:

  1. We sat down at a table/counter
  2. A fresh cheese pizza was served
  3. We each sampled a slice
  4. We each filled out a score card for that pizzeria
  5. We got in an Uber (or walked) to the next pizzeria

Rules:

Here’s what I told the judges ahead of time:

  • You’ll be sampling 6 slices of pizza over the course of the afternoon, so don’t show up too full.
  • You won’t need to eat the whole slice each time if you don’t want to, but you should plan on eating at least one bite of the cheesy part and one bite of the crust.
  • Have your normal breakfast so you’re not super hungry for the first slice (wouldn’t want to influence the ratings)
  • We will be eating plain cheese pizza only (no toppings) to keep things relatively uniform
  • We will be eating different styles of pizza, so each slice must be evaluated on its own merits. Can’t just say “I hate deep dish” and give it a low score
  • Keep your scores secret! We don’t want to reveal them until the video is finished, and we don’t want to influence each others’ scores to the extent possible.

At the end of the day, we had 30 pizza scorecards (6 pizzerias X 5 judges). I added the data to Google Sheets, and weighted the “Taste” factors twice as strongly as the “Appearance” factors. Then I  added up the totals to get these final scores:

The Results: The Best Pizza in Francisco

Congratulations to Square Pie Guys!

There are more graphs, as well as the full judge-by-judge scoring, available in the final scores data.

And here’s the finished video…enjoy!