The Mission now has so many great artisan pizza places. PizzaHacker touts itself as having brought forth a pizza baby by way of New York City and Napoli, by a Jew from Ohio. Those are quite the credentials!
We ordered a couple of pies. First, the top shelf margherita, with a Mariquita Farms dry-farmed early girl tomato sauce, fresh house-stretched mozzarella, and basil. It’s the name of the producer of the tomatoes for that sauce that made this a “top shelf,” compared to their other, regular old margherita, but unfortunately, while it had good flavor, it tasted like it had sat for a while and was a bit dry. Too bad, because the crust looked killer, and probably had been right after it came out of the oven.
Our second pie, the short bridge, came with soppressata, house-made Llano Seco hot Italian sausage, mozzarella, mushrooms, tomato sauce, oregano, and parm. It’s excellent; the Llano Seco sausage had a very porcine/porky/oinky flavor, more than most sausages, where you taste the spices first. Great crust, with the required charring. Juicy, cheesy, and spicy, too — the trifecta. Didn’t need any doctoring (although Mike’s hot honey is not doctoring, but a requisite gilding of the lily — thanks to JoyRide Pizza for the inspiration!)
We also got their version of a chopped salad, the intermezzo, with radicchio, little gems, rainbow carrot, radish, chickpeas, organic “vital” farm egg in a poppyseed dressing. It was huge (the picture below shows only a third of it), but we found it pretty insipid. Mostly, we didn’t care for the sweetish dressing, but I should have figured it had honey in it. We’d have preferred a vinaigrette or blue cheese option.
PizzaHacker’s menu is drool-inducing: there are pizzas with chorizo, broccoli rabe or garlic cream sauce, veggie pizzas with an egg, meatballs, a puttanesca pizza … and even a square pizza, Detroit style. They all sound wonderful. Like everyone else, we can’t wait to go back to eating in-house, because some pizzas just don’t travel as well as others.
But if you can get it via either pick-up or delivery and have it to your house within about 5-10 minutes, I’d say do yourself a favor. You can also buy some Calabrian crushed chili paste, vino, and their pizza dough to make it yourself. But, come on…. we’ve all made pizza at home, and unless you’ve got a wood-fired pizza oven sitting in your backyard, it’s never going to be as good as this. Even if you do live 5 minutes from here (and lucky you!) Let the experts take care of you.
PizzaHacker (website)
3299 Mission St.
Bonus: A video we made in 2014 as part of our Best Thing I Ever Ate in the Mission series.
I’m fortunate to live within a 5 minute walk. My favorite is the Yo Vinny with marinated onions and peppers, with spicy oinky sausage. I also get the top shelf Marg for the vegetarian in the house. Be sure to get a side of the chili paste.
Love pizza hacker and the name is super futuristic and very kewl. Best pizza I’ve had in California
Great, something hopefully to take the place of Mozzeria. But the dated name sucks. Reminds me of how I hated High Tech Burrito in Marin of the 80s. We don’t want a hacked pizza, we want an authentic Naples-style pizza.
Hi Chaz!
Pizza Hacker has been there for over seven years.
I love that Llano Seco “oinky” sausage and order it regularly, along with my Castro Coffee Company caffeine fix. Some things are too good to leave behind when you move house. Word.