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My New Top 10

San Francisco Magazine By Josh Sens / August 200

Like fashion long before it, the restaurant industry has come to embrace the branding of big names: witness the mass production of Michael Mina and the Aqua empire. Such restaurants exert a magnetic pull, and not just on your wallet. Some even serve good food. But I’m drawn more strongly to the ones that retain a personal touch. Like a lot of diners, I like to frequent places where the person in the toque has a stake in how I feel about my steak. Of the best restaurants to open recently around the Bay Area, some are big and splashy, run by well-connected chefs relying on deep pockets. Others are tiny operations opened by solo restaurateurs. What they have in common is a trait shared by good restaurants everywhere: they bear the marks of an emotional investment, of an owner’s passion—and not merely a rubber-stamped imprimatur.

Pizzaiolo

The power of sharp marketing is readily apparent in that popular game called Six Degrees of Chez Panisse. An ambitious restaurateur who once peeled a shallot in Alice Waters’s kitchen opens his own place, and the public follows, convinced that some wizardry must have worn off.

In the case of Charlie Hallowell, however, the chef had a long tenure at that famous Berkeley temple of the four seasons. The separation is only one degree.

There was, to be sure, something cultish in the fervor that swelled around the opening of Pizzaiolo. Part of it was pedigree. But most of it was Hallowell’s perfect timing. Temescal, a fast-gentrifying patch of Oakland, was desperately hungry for something like this.

Along with Doña Tomas, which stands next door, Pizzaiolo gives locals what they long wanted on a stretch of Telegraph that now has pedestrians pushing strollers where they used to push something else.

Here, in a big, rustic setting with a wood-burning oven and exposed brick walls, Hallowell turns out humble pastas like spaghetti with pesto and bucatini in pork ragù.

There’s so much endearing about the restaurant—the chef waving to patrons from his open kitchen, the photos of his children on the wall—that you forgive the flaws, the clunky service, the adolescent way in which the dining room is run.

What’s more, there’s the food: solid Italian dishes not pretending to be anything more than what they are. Sitting at the bar, you can soak up the buzz of conversation while you watch the pizzaiolos toss your pie. Outside a crowd has gathered, waiting patiently, pleasantly, on a sidewalk that used to be so lonely and forlorn at night.