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 I moved here.
“It was just different out here. We still had great pizza,” says Tony Gemignani, the world pizza champion who grew up in Fremont. “But you had to really know where to find it. It wasn’t on every corner.”
The Bay Area has since shed its reputation as a pizza backwater. Gemignani helped establish it as one of the craft’s 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.
Since becoming America’s 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.
Gemignani, who spoke with us on Tuesday, opened Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco’s North Beach district in 2009 and soon began selling pizza by the slice at a storefront next door to it.
The outgrowth of that enterprise is Tony’s Slice House, a fast-expanding franchise that opened in Mountain View early in 2024, followed by its 27th store at Milpitas’ Great Mall last November. A San Jose location, at the Coleman Ave. Market Center, is scheduled to open this year.
His Slice House restaurants in Mountain View, Millbrae, Belmont and Haight Ashbury will participate in Bay Area Pizza Week from April 22 through May 3, 2026, a promotion organized by the Weeklys Media Group.
The Mountain View location, owned and operated by his Fremont High School classmate Pritika Rajasanshi, will serve as its pizza week special a New York-style pizza unique to the location: Apricot Fields. Inspired by his family’s apricot ranch in the Fremont hills, Gemignani pairs mozzarella, ricotta and Romano cheeses with sausage and bacon, finished with Hollister apricot preserves, hot pepper oil, garlic and pesto.
Like most things remixed in California, pizza’s culinary trajectory was bent when innovator Alice Waters installed a wood burning oven and added pizzas to the menu at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. That led to the rise of artisanal pizza, with ingredients like nettles, figs and goat cheese.
Waters’ addition of pizza to a fine dining menu prompted Wolfgang Puck to bring the Italian working class people’s food to Hollywood’s Spago restaurant and give it a celebrity veneer—with dill-infused crème fraîche, caviar and smoked salmon.
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 don’t need a full bar or table service. Hence the concept of a refined product in a fast-casual environment.
Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya’s 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—and even worked with a manufacturer to design a triple-stacked oven that could fit six large pizzas on each deck. “We do 20 inch rounds. That’s our biggest pizza,” Gemignani says. “I designed it so it could do 18 20s at once.”
Rather than simply focus on one style of pie, Gemignani serves several US 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 “Grandma-style” pizza and a Detroit-style square pizza.
The focus on basics has served as a foundation for—rather than a filter of—innovation. Brightly colored purple potato slices garnish a signature dish at the Slice House.
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’s accelerating popularity. “You have equipment. You have ingredients. you have procedures. There’s almost too much information now online. There’s way more than there was when I started 37 years ago. There were only like a couple of books about pizza.”
“You’re able to make really great restaurant-quality pizza at home. And I think that that’s exciting. The funny thing is, well, how has that [negatively] affected the pizza business? Not for me. I’ve been growing. I’ve written books. I’ve done a lot of podcasts. I’ve answered a lot of questions about making great pizza at home. I think the whole craft is elevated.”
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 any style of pizza pretty much in the Bay Area.
“It was never like that 30 years ago—or even 20 years ago. It’s really evolved, and it’s great. It’s not just good pizza, it’s great pizza, and you can find it up and down the peninsula and all over now.”
