When Pasta Pomodoro was a household name, a friend of mine insisted on eating there every time the stars lined up. A routine meal included a starter salad followed by a sauced pasta. The meals were dependable and unimaginative, an Olive Garden-esque concept aimed at a more urban crowd.
Or a less suburban crowd, depending on one’s point of view. The minimalist approach to everything, from the décor to the plating, meant that the bills were affordable for recent college grads, young families dining out, and anyone on a budget craving the idea of Italian food.
When all 15 of their Bay Area locations shuttered for good in 2016, headlines noted that the employees were laid off via email. Earlier than that in 2010, Adriano Paganini, the founder of Pasta Pomodoro, had already started Delarosa in San Francisco, located in the Marina, and later in downtown SF.
I was aware of the restaurant without being drawn to it. Pizzeria Delfina, followed by Flour + Water and Del Popolo, came to define artisanal thin-crust pizza-making for me. When many more pizza pop-ups started to roam the streets in food trucks, or morphed into bricks and mortars, the thought of eating at Delarosa receded even further into the background.
Earlier this month, Delarosa opened a fourth location in California Pizza Kitchen’s former spot at the Stanford Shopping Center. A Delarosa pizza, I recently discovered, is made Roman-style. It’s a super thin delight that gets crispy and slightly scorched on the edges with a pliable center that just barely holds its own as a vehicle for carrying ingredients to the mouth.
We tried the capricciosa ($22), a red-sauced pizza topped with prosciutto, artichokes and wild mushrooms. The bitterness had been baked out of the artichokes. Pairing them with wild mushrooms and prosciutto felt inspired, one step beyond that solid standby pepperoni and button mushrooms.
We started the meal with two seasonal appetizers: delicata squash from the “fritti” section and a salad made with bitter lettuce and diced squash. Fritti means fried in Italian but the thin slices of delicata, skin intact, weren’t saturated in oil. I’m surprised the vegetable hasn’t caught on or caught up in popularity with the ubiquitous and odoriferous brussel sprout. In the salad, the sweet pieces of squash tasted like the last best delicious bites of an autumn harvest.
With Pasta Pomodoro as a reference point, we finished dinner with a vegetarian lasagne. The dish doesn’t photograph well. Nor is it particularly pretty to look at. But it’s heaped with satisfying commingling blankets of melted cheese, pasta, and sauce. The version we had was laced with zucchini slivers, which, without knowing what vegetables would be involved, pleased me to no end. We indulged in lasagne because the Roman pizza didn’t line our stomachs with burdensome layers of heavy breading.
The beiges, yellows and browns of CPK’s interior décor have been replaced and updated with punchier vibrant oranges and warmer wood veneer floors. California poppy orange, along with other 1970s earth tones, is returning to the mood boards of design professionals and then showing up in retail spaces throughout the region.
This approach successfully evokes nostalgia for a bygone era but doesn’t feel weighed down by it. The pleather booths have been rebuilt and recovered in lighter fabrics that are great temporary “sofas” for family outings. A neighboring booth comfortably contained a family of four who swooped in for pizza and then swooped out the door when the kids’ post-meal boredom and fussiness turned into whines and cries.
Fifteen years after opening, Delarosa hasn’t expanded at the same rate as Pasta Pomodoro did. This Palo Alto iteration of the brand is the first in Silicon Valley. Choosing the Stanford Shopping Center is a smart choice to begin a southerly expansion. It should succeed in that ecosystem as both an after-work meeting place for colleagues as well as for moms and dads who don’t have the energy or willpower to cook.
Delarosa
136 Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto
Open daily at 11am
650.785.1221
delarosasf.com
