You’re in San Francisco, perhaps on a Monday or Tuesday when Tony’s is closed and you want some great woodfired pizza. There is a restaurant just two blocks from the Yerba Buena Center and MOMA near 4th and Folsom that may have what you are looking for called Zero Zero. Named of course for the famous Italian flour that can make the best pizza crust, this restaurant has a lot to offer. The ambiance is cozy industrial with exposed girders and dark hip spaces. Upstairs, the impressive bar has a mural which at first seems warm, amber and vaguely food related. Upon closer inspection we see Pinocchio the puppet seems to have been nightmarishly stuck into a pizza. If someone can explain this mural to me, I would appreciate it.

Downstairs the enormous Mugnaini oven churns out pizza at a staggering pace. You are welcome to watch the pizzaiolos at work, but don’t expect them to slow down to chat. They have a job to do and they’re doing it well. Be sure to notice the notch cut into the marble work slab and how they use it to steady the wooden peel when they load the pizza to chute it to the oven.

The warm olives at Zero Zero make a humble yet sublime antipasti. Do you warm your olives prior to serving? It makes all the difference in how the flavor opens up. I don’t think I’m going back to cold olives ever again. Frankie G recommends putting a ramekin with olive oil, garlic and citrus peel in the oven for a couple minutes to heat the oil, then toss the olives in the oil before warming them for a short time in the oven. You don’t want to cook the olives, just warm them up.

The salad of “Arugula, beets, Cara Cara orange, avocado, radish and citrus vinaigrette” was one of the best salads I’ve ever had. The baby arugula made a perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of the orange and beets. The rich avocado melted with the citrus vinaigrette and the whole plate was a feast for the eyes as well.

Pizzas were good to very good. One of the best was the Valencia made with Broccoli di Ciccio, green olives, and creamy Crescenza cheese. A subtle kick from some Calabrian red chiles balanced that pizza perfectly. The Fillmore was also good with ‘Hen of the Woods mushrooms’ (AKA Mitake mushrooms), leeks, thyme and four cheeses. This pizza was a perfect fall or winter warmer with all its earthly richness. Less satisfying was the Margherita Extra. Perhaps I’m spoiled as I do expect a lot from this kind of pizza, but this version seemed lacking. A Margherita is an exercise in both restraint and excess. It contains only four toppings which should be pronounced yet in balance. This version used an acceptable tomato sauce and buffalo mozzarella, yet I counted four puny leaves of basil and no taste of the De Padova olive oil. When I eat Margherita, I want to be bathed in the tastes of basil, olive oil, tomato and fresh mozzarella but this was more of a moist towelette than a bath.

Perhaps the most genius part of the menu at Zero Zero is the ice cream dessert offerings which are presented on small menus that you circle your choices using Lilliputlian pencils. No matter how full you are, I will be surprised if you do not leap forward and start marking the menu with childlike giddiness. The Strauss family dairy soft serve ice cream is a firm, grown up version of the stuff reminiscent of summer afternoons at the Dairy Queen without any of the artificial nastiness while the toppings remind you that you are still firmly planted in a fine SF restaurant; pomegranate seeds with saffron, citrus compote with Sicilian Orange Oil. Most surprising of all the ice cream toppings is the Da Vero olive oil and sea salt. This combination did not taste as one may expect but rather beautifully fruity with sparks of crunchy salt amid the sweet cream. Delightful.

Zero Zero: Lunch, brunch, dinner. 826 Folsom, SF, CA. 415 348 8800

Have you ever wanted to learn about making better pizza but weren't sure where to find a "Pizza School"?  You're in luck.  One of the best pizza makers in the world, Tony Gemignani, just opened a pizza school in the United States.
  If you are not familiar with Tony, I will attempt to summarize his extensive qualifications.  He and his brother Frank opened their first pizzeria in 1991 when Tony was just eighteen.  He taught himself some pizza tricks to entertain customers and unwittingly invented many of the tricks which are now the standard repertoire of modern pizza competitors.   Just four years later he started competing on the international level and was crowned the World Champion Pizza Acrobat eight times from 1995-2007.  In 2007, he also rocked the pizza world in Naples when he won the title of World Champion Pizza Maker with his Neapolitan pizza.  This was the first time an American was chosen for the baking competition over the Italians.  I can't help but think of the 1973 Judgement of Paris wine competition when the California wines were chosen over the French ones.  Since then, Gemignani has become the coach of the World Pizza Champions, written a cookbook and appeared countless times on television.  No one in the pizza world has been more featured or won more titles than Tony Gemignani.
  Recently, he opened an amazing pizza restaurant in San Francisco which is also the location of his International School of Pizza.  This school offers everything from Home Chef instruction to official certification from the oldest pizza school in Italy, Scuola Itala ina Pizzaioli. This was the kind of education I had been looking for.  
I spent two mornings with Tony at his school in his restaurant Tony's Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco.   This was one of the shortest course offered, but he customizes each class to the needs of the students and every minute of instruction was at my level.  
The first day started over espresso with Tony. This was a great way to start.  Very welcoming and charming. He talked with each student and got to know what our abilities and needs were.  Since he tries to keep the class to six students or less, he has the time to get to know each person and what they expect to gain from the class.   We spent the first hour or so learning about ingredients such as the four types of flour Tony uses for his pizzas.  We learned how important dough temperature is and how important it is to keep the dough temperature consistent between batches despite the temperature of your kitchen.  This master instructor shared his thoughts about climates, water, salt, yeast, and other ingredients. Are you using the right wood in your wood oven?   Did you know there is a secret to adding wood to your fire so that is catches fire immediately and does not lower the temperature of your oven?  Did you know that you can control the direction of the flame in your oven through wood placement?   Do you know how the mineral content of water affects dough?  Do you know why some pizzas are more digestible than others?
Each day also offered plenty of hands-on instruction.  We mixed and balled and worked with different types of dough.  We stretched the dough and improved our handling skills side-by-side with Tony.  We used two of the four different ovens in the restaurant to bake our pizzas and we ate.  A lot.  My advice?  If you take his courses, go hungry.  
The final exam, although Tony would not call it this, was when he said, "OK, make a pizza."  It is hard to describe how intimidating yet thrilling it is to have the World Champion Pizza Maker tell you that you have full access to his ovens and ingredients.  I felt like I did OK when he took a bite of my pizza and said, "That's pretty good." 
Speaking of access to his ingredients, one of the benefits of the class is the "Pizza Pro Card" that you get at the end.  This card lets students return to buy flour, cheese, dough, yeast, or whatever else they might want.  Since few of these imported items can be found in stores, this card is a treasure if you live near San Francisco.  Tony also sends his students home with ample samples of all kinds of things like bags of flour and yeast.  He has a generous heart.
There are many videos available of Tony doing acrobatics or joking around.  He has a great sense of humor but one thing that impressed me was how seriously he takes the art of pizza creation.  One of the slogans for Tony's Pizza Napoletana is "Respect the craft." This is evident every time Tony picks up a ball of dough and coaxes all the divine flavor and texture that he can from each and every pizza.  I asked him if, after almost 20 years and possibly a million pizzas, he ever gets tired of pizza.  He took a bite of a roman style, arugula, goat cheese, cherry tomato and prosciutto pizza he had made for breakfast and said simply, "Not at all".  
He has dedicated his life to pizza making and is now sharing his incredible knowledge with a few students. If you take pizza making seriously and want to learn from a master, consider taking a course from Tony Gemignani at the International School of Pizza.
 

Interesting review of the new wave of artisan pizza places in NY City here. The interactive photo series gives a nice voiceover to several of the restaurants reviewed.