San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
E Bay Area
long after moving to the Bay Area from Seattle, Schechter interned and then worked in his off-hours at restaurants like Pizzahacker and Pizzeria Delfina in Burlingame. (“It was really a trial by fire,” he says of Saturday shifts at the latter. “I have the burns from the pizza oven to prove it.”)
In his other spare time, he practiced baking DSP at home, with an eye on taking it pro. Schechter says he didn’t want to open yet another shop selling crisp-crusted, naturally leavened, seasonally responsive Bay Area pizzas. “I love the flavor profile: This fluffy dough, the crispy bottom, the cheese (that) pushes out to the edge,” Schechter says. “In your one bite of Detroitstyle you get the texture experience of a whole pie.”
In March 2018, after Pizzahacker owner Jeff Krupman dropped his longrunning pizza pop-up nights at Vinyl, a wine bar on Divisadero, Schechter took over the deck ovens to bake New York and Neapolitan pizzas. Five months in, he roped in Danny Stoller, who had cooked for decades under Seattle’s best-known chefs and now works here for a culinary innovation company.
They bought blue-steel pans from pizza champion Randazzo, who now has a second career supplying aspirational DSP makers like them. On Thursday and Friday nights, the Square Pie Guys now put out pies like the PeppeRoni-Burgundy and a Mean Green Sausage Machine with ricotta sauce, roasted broccolini and honey. Beyond their crackling rim and airy crumb, the pies don’t quite taste like Buddy’s or Tony’s DSP. They aren’t spotted with #sauceontop. They don’t use brick cheese. If we’re speaking frankly, Square Pie Guys’ pizzas taste as if serious cooks brought the Pizza Hut pan pizza up to San Francisco standards. This is, in every way, a compliment.
“Regional styles are important only so much as they erect a framework for what it is,” Stoller says. “Beyond that it’s a playground. It’s an open space.”
Which is the crux of the paradox of pizza authenticity. We may have moved beyond the 2000s, when restaurants posted “True Neapolitan Pizza” certifications on their front windows, but to me the proclamation of regional pizza styles feels like an unnecessary repackaging of America’s favorite food as a cultural experience. The most absurd example of this is the Seattle restaurateur who has tried over the course of two restaurants to make the case that Minnesota pizza exists. Like other former Minnesotans, I have two oneword responses: “No” and “Why?”
So why, in fact, are we eating Detroit-style pizza? (Because of that crisp cheese crust.) Will it be true Detroitstyle pizza? (No.) Will we argue over its authenticity anyway? (Ahem.)
Schechter and Stoller are looking at spaces in the East Bay, hoping to keep their San Francisco pop-up humming while opening a restaurant that trains workers the Bay Area tech economy has marginalized. Pizza, the two cooks think, can do that. It’s kind of a magical food, really: a communal meal, a comfort food, one equally enjoyed by people who obsess over the details and people who have never heard of the World Pizza Championships.
“I can’t think of too many people who just don’t love pizza,” Schechter says.