At 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, Outta Sight Pizza head chef Sean Sieling is savoring a moment of calm before the dinner rush.
In about an hour, the federal employees ending their workday will begin marching in, and Sieling will be slinging pies nonstop until the restaurant closes five hours later. Earlier that day, an order for 20 pies pinged on Sieling’s DoorDash portal, delaying the rest of his online orders for about an hour. It’s a juggling act.
“We feel a lot of responsibility for everybody that gets into line, to provide them the same experience whether they’re here at 11 o’clock when we open, or 9 o’clock when we’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re closing,’” Sieling said. “Everybody deserves the same slice of pizza or the same sandwich.”
In a neighborhood that has struggled to get back to business since the COVID-19 pandemic, Outta Sight Pizza, at 422 Larkin St. in the Tenderloin, regularly has a line of customers that stretches out the door.
It has been a favorite of critics and locals since it opened in 2023. Born from a series of Mission District popups, Outta Sight’s flagship restaurant has been successful enough for the owners, Peter Dorrance and Eric Ehler, to open a second location in Chinatown earlier this year.
But there’s no secret to its success, Dorrance said, beyond making something people love and being on the right streets.
“When we first opened up the Tenderloin location, the common remark was, ‘Why would you open up there?’ And it would just make us so mad, like, why wouldn’t we?” Dorrance said. “There’s no place in the city that is going to have that much foot traffic. We didn’t know we’d be that big, but it worked out.”
That said, some of Outta Sight’s success comes from a Tenderloin location that appears to be optimally located for foot traffic, from government workers at Civic Center, University of California San Francisco Law, the library and the Asian Art Museum. Its newest location in Chinatown at 643 Clay St. is on the edge of the Financial District, less than a block from the Transamerica Pyramid. Large catering orders for corporate parties provide financial stability for both sites, Dorrance said.
Dorrance and Ehler, both 36, have backgrounds in fine dining, including at Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s. That experience informs the kitchen at Outta Sight, both in their ambitious flavors and workplace ethics.
Pizza toppings go beyond pepperoni to jerk chicken, peking duck, mapo tofu and jalapeño popper. And, unlike the culture of fine dining, a healthy work-life balance and time off for employees is a priority at Outta Sight, as is front-of-house and back-of-house equity: Both are tipped out evenly and offered the same benefits.
Business has been good, though Dorrance wonders if it’s good enough. While Outta Sight’s gross sales go up every year, rising costs of produce, insurance and power — plus the occasional headache of a broken freezer, which he’s dealing with now — keep their profit margins slim.
If the business goes a few days without a large catering order, Dorrance starts to panic. “None of us went to business school,” Dorrance said. “It’s like trial and error.”
But in an atmosphere redolent with the smell of crushed tomatoes, hope rises like, well, pizza dough.
“There’s so many nonprofits and people in the Tenderloin and in that community that have been constantly fighting for the youth and elderly and underprivileged for 20-plus years. Day one when we started building out, they’d come into the shop and say, I want to introduce myself,” Dorrance said. “There’s a sense of pride that they have down there, and you get washed in it.”
“If we can make it here, we can make it anywhere, right?” Sieling said.
I live in north beach and work near civic center; I’m so happy to have Outta Sight in my life.
Thanks for this – I love Outta Sight!