The Best North Beach Food Tour in San Francisco
Welcome to beautiful San Francisco! Let's spend the afternoon eating our way around the city's historic North Beach district, better known as Little Italy. We'll try all the delicious cheesy and tomato-y recipes our Italian-American friends are famous for, plus some cold, refreshing surprises in this four-course adventure.
Booking this food tour was no happenstance. For my birthday, my coworkers at Waltz Creative thought to themselves, "What group gift could we get for Jessica? Something so thoughtful and specific to her hobbies and desires that she will be forever indebted to us, and promise a blood oath to our children and our children's children?" Obviously, birthdays are a big deal at Waltz.
Knowing that Brandon and I are world travelers and major foodies, the generous result was a gift certificate for a food tour in San Francisco, hosted by the tour company Avital.
Their website offers several tour locations, including the SF Mission District, a Latin neighborhood with phenomenal culinary innovations. But as Californians, we eat incredible Mexican food on the daily; tacos, burritos, chips and salsa - it's everywhere!
What we lack is quality Italian cuisine. The North Beach food tour promised a journey through the "former Barbary Coast - know as the most notorious neighborhood in America during the Gold Rush" and all the mouth-watering carbs we could eat. Game on!
First stop, Sotto Mare - Oysteria & Seafood on Green Street.
Known for "the best damn cioppino" in the city, Sotto Mare served as our tour's appetizer leg; well, one of them. In Italian, sotto mare means "under the sea," which is where Italian-American fishermen dating all the way back to the late 1800s would catch their livelihood out on the famously foggy waters of San Francisco's coastline.
Swaying with the tide on their fishing boats, the men strived for efficiency. Instead of sailing home every night, they would remain on the open water for days at a time, hauling in fresh squid, clams, crab, mussels, shrimp, scallops and fish.
At night, they would tie their boats together and share the day's salty feast with their fellow fishermen in a communal stew known as cioppino. Local folklore says the name cioppino comes from their cries to "Chip in! Chip in!" when the soup pot came around, but according to food historians, the name more likely comes from the Italian word "ciuppin" which refers to a fish soup.
This was our first cioppino experience and it did not disappoint, packed with tender, fresh seafood caught right there in the San Francisco bay. We dipped our crusty bread and shared sweet wine while the tour guide entertained us with tales of the mysterious deep.
She asked our group if anyone knew what makes Sotto Mare's cioppino special, compared to the traditional recipe. No, it isn't the shrimp or the crab legs still in their shells. She pointed to the tubes of penne with a flourish and said "aha!"
We relished the addition of this pasta to the soup, as it provided a more filling kickoff to our tour, which would take around three hours in total. Between this savory start, several stops dedicated purely to the neighborhood's dark history, and a sweet end, we had a long way to go!
On the second appetizer stop of the tour, we walked over to Barbara - Pinseria & Cocktail Bar on Columbus Avenue.
Barbara is a modern Roman pizzerie, named after the owner's grandma. Its specialty is pinsa, a cloud-like pizza made with lighter ingredients.
According to the restaurant's website, "Pinsa is an ancient style of Roman pizza made using combination of soy, rice, and heirloom wheat flour. The dough is left to rise for 48-72 hours, then baked at a lower temperature. The result is a thick but light and airy crispy crust, rich in natural fiber."
Have you ever heard of such a thing? It sounds fantastic! On our visit, we sampled something a bit lighter, as to not spoil the main course to come. The tour guide carefully passed around these plates of suppli al telefono, a fried mozzarella cheese and rice flour appetizer covered in marinara sauce. It's like a huge mozzarella stick, but more crispy and dense.
Its name comes from the shape it takes when broken in half and stretched by hand to form a long string of cheese, resembling an old school telephone wire with two earpieces on each end.
This, my friends, is an Aperol spritz. Light and slightly sweet, it's a class Italian refresher that looks like a golden sunset. The Aperol brand describes the bright orange apéritif as, “zesty orange with complex herbal scents harmonized with a touch of vanilla.” Combined with ice, prosecco, a splash of club soda and a fresh orange slice, this spritz is too easy to drink.
I love the bold patterns and warm orange interior of Barbara, which perfectly matches their Aperol spritz cocktail.
Finally, we've arrived at the main course of our Italian food tour - PIZZA! (What else?)
As we munched on steaming slices of Italian pepperoni and fresh spinach with shaved parmesan, eyes closed to savor every bite, our tour guide leaned in to inspire us with the history of Tommaso's Ristorante Italiano on Kearny Street.
Tommaso's was the first pizzeria on the West Coast to use a wood-fired brick oven, brought over from the Italian motherland. Reaching temperatures of over 900 degrees to cook its pies, Tommaso's oven stays hot year-round and is only allowed to cool down over the Christmas holiday for any necessary repairs. Though, the owners will proudly tell you the oven has not needed any major mending since it's first use nearly 100 years ago in 1935. Impressive!
Often imitated, never duplicated, locals and tourists agree that if you're only going to eat one piece of pizza in San Francisco, it's gotta be at Tommaso's.
The acclaimed 900+ degree oven, just steps away from the subterranean dining room, is nestled below street level into the steep hills for which San Francisco is famous.
Beautifully painted murals of the Amalfi Coast cover each wall, harkening to a simpler time when people ate pizza without counting calories. In fact, legend says that the artist who painted the murals for the restaurant was paid in spaghetti and meatballs!
A final nugget of hot gossip our tour guide shared is that Tommaso's is frequented by the owner's good friend Francis Ford Coppola, who famously wrote and directed "The Godfather," and Coppola's actor nephew, Nicolas Cage.
Full and happy, our tour group asked, what comes next? Remember, when we booked this Avital food tour, we knew we'd spend the afternoon in North Beach, but had no idea which specific restaurants we'd visit or how many delicacies the day would bring. Our personable tour guide revealed each destination in the moment.
Now, several hours into the tour, she gave us a break from munching, allowing us time to make room for dessert, and strolled us over to several historic and culturally fascinating areas of the neighborhood, regaling us with stories of debauchery and deceit, hidden art and women to fear.
Click here to read my blog post about that part of our tour. You won't believe what happened in the tunnels underneath San Francisco during the Gold Rush days!
Now that you're back from the history tour, let's get right to the best part, dessert!
Lush Gelato, located on Columbus Avenue, sprang from the brain of master chef Federico, whose dedication in offering "unique flavors, made from scratch" has cemented this gelateria as the best in the city.
The Lush test kitchen is always whipping up exciting new flavors, made with only the freshest ingredients. This may seem like common sense, but when chef Federico was learning the trade in an Argentine-style gelateria, they taught him to make gelato with powdered ingredients to save money.
Unsatisfied with the resulting flavor and texture, he bucked tradition and started making gelato from scratch by invested in quality ingredients and experimenting with surprising flavor combinations like cardamom and lemon bars, strawberry and balsamic vinegar.
Word spread about his heavenly small-batch dessert and Lush now boast several locations. Who knew that cream, sugar and egg yolk could cause such a revolution?
Some flavors we loved:
- Strawberry mascarpone
- Yuzu citrus
- Black garlic and lime leaves
- Creme fraiche and baked apples
- Vietnamese cinnamon
- Blue cheese and pear
- Dulce de leche
- Brown butter with chocolate honeycomb
Thanks for joining us on our scrumptious foodie adventure around Little Italy. We ended the tour here at Little Red Window, too full to try their aromatic empanadas, but happy enough to enjoy the colorful murals that cover the walls of their restaurant.
If you haven't read it already, now you can head over to the history part of our food tour to learn about the dastardly deeds done during the San Francisco Gold Rush those many years ago.
Or you can click here to read about our dessert walk through San Francisco's Chinatown district, the oldest and largest Chinatown in America. We even caught a glimpse of some high-flying lion mask dancers while we were there!
Looking for something fun to do once the sun sets, after a full day of food touring and sightseeing in the city? We enjoyed a late night comedy show at Cobb's Comedy Club, which felt so official compared to the amateur open mic nights we've been to before.