Beer list.

The Trippel was pretty damn good — Pi Bar got one keg, Toronado got there other. Never had the Blind Pig before, very enjoyable. (And note the elephant in the corner…)

It’s a glorious slice!

Throw your dough in the air…

Pi Bar is a very welcome addition to La Lengua and a worthy successor to Suriya. Very casual, very comfortable. Excellent, simple, thin crust pizza, just the way the pizza gods intended. I look forward to many a happy hour there. (And they have coat hooks under the bar which is a sign of a superior establishment…)

via UrbanDaddy

Brought to you by Rich Rosen (Chenery Park, Boulevard), a Queens transplant who’s always lamented the lack of real New York–style pie in SF, Pi will deliver a taste of Long Island moxie, done up SF–style. Which means you’ll find no-nonsense pizzas in 15-inch or 21, as well as pizza by the slice (preferably held taco–style with three fingers while standing)—made with whatever standard toppings (not fennel fronds or roasted garlic) you want.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a San Francisco restaurant without using fresh, local ingredients. And, you’ll appreciate the other thing they’re keeping local (with some select Belgians thrown in the mix): the booze. Look for 12 craft brews on tap—with only Anchor Liberty Ale and Blind Pig IPA staying in rotation—that are mostly one-offs like the Sierra Nevada Trippel, as well as more than 30 by the bottle. And if you want to study up, they’ve put together a beer bible with insider stories on each beer in house.

There will also be a nightly happy hour—”Pi R Squared”—that’ll be a slice and pint for $6.28.

I look forward to watching those lacking east coast pizza experience learn to eat a pizza with one hand.

More photos on Flickr by xbleh (including the one above, apparently), and Adam at MenuPages has links to the permits.

“It was magic! A raw, flabby Frisbee of dough, with uncooked, slightly sweet tomato sauce and completely flavorless chess went into a magic box.  And we would stare and stand for 7 long minutes in anticipation.  And what was in the oven when he opened the door was a sight and smell that still lives with me today.”

So the large pizzas at Pi Bar are supposed to be 22″ wide and have 7 slices – 22÷7, get it?? (Zagat via Grubstreet.)

But how do you cut a pie into seven slices? Very carefully, I suppose:

Or is this one of those math puzzles? “Cut into seven slices using as few cuts as possible…”

Or are they taking an asynchronous cut from Pepe’s in New Haven?

When pizza parlors started popping up all over the country, Pepe’s refused to conform to the perfect triangular slice and, to this day, slice up some pretty random freestyle shapes. Occasionally, you’ll get a triangle, but it’s definitely an accident…

(Oh, man, clam pie.  I miss clam pie in a bad way.)

• hoping to open in late August (if all goes well with the ABC)
• open until midnight
• cheese slices to be $3.14!
• planning on painting their circle-π logo on the door (though I think they should have both that and a slice icon…)

Anyway, looking forward to that opening. I am happy to see La Lengua‘s flat-food empire continuing to expand: Pi Bar, Anthony’s Cookies,  Zante’s Indian Pizza, El Zocalo’s pupusas. (What other flat food is out there?)

Thin crust – check.   Slices – check!  Welcome to La Lengua, my circular-food-making friends..

(I’m thinking a new mural competition, no?)

TO OUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS OF VALENCIA ST.

After years of economic and personal trials, Suriya Thai Restaurant closd its doors for the last time on March 4th of this year.  They will be missed by many.

The owner of 1432 decided, perhaps for a fresh start, to paint over the well known Elephant Mural that graced the doors for the past 17 years.

The ground floor remained empty for two months when a neighborhood couple approached the landlord with a proposal to open a new restaurant called “Pi Bar”.

What we hope to create is a clean, family friendly, neighborhood place featuring hand thrown, thin crust pizza made from locally sourced ingredients.  The plan is to be open seven days a week, offering pizza by the slice or the whole pie.

In addition we also plan to serve fresh salads, vegetables and toppings made with local organic produce, as well as arisitian wine and beer.

It is our intention to be a well lit, positive addition to the community, offering a warm friendly environment to food lovers of all ages to gather.  Above all, we want to be good neighbors, and are looking forward to meeting all of you.

We regret any inconvenience that might be caused by our transition.

At your service, Jen, Rich and the Staff of Pi Bar.

So I don’t quite understand all the uproar over “too many pizza places in the Mission”, but hey, I guess some people get tired of complaining about too many taquerias.

I love Delfina but it’s a hike, as is Flour & Water. But my stance on the poor state of utility pizza in this city is well known (well, it’s known):

I have a theory that each city has the ability to do one or two high-volume convenience foods really well, where the average option is really quite good — but this specialization consumes so much karmic food preparation energy that the other quick food options are average at best, if not sad. (Note that I’m not talking about restaurants here, in which we have an embarrassing surplus of talent, but rather non-chain, walk-in, walk-out.)

So having a solid pizza place in La Lengua will be great, and if they do slices I will be THRILLED.   Arinell’s is OK, but ever since the Cybelle’s on 24th stopped doing those little slices aka mini pizzas, I’ve been bummed. And If they throw in some vegan pies for our friends, all the better. (And beer! Pitchers please! And tables I can carve my name into.)

They had better paint something AWESOME on that door or the ghost of elephants will, um, trample upon their dough, and not in a good way.

As Vegansaurus notes, stop by and tell them what you want — slices, vegan, pitchers, murals… Vive la rivoluzione (della pizza)!

Math Dork Observation – the digits in the address, 1432, can be rearranged to be 3.142=∏!

Font Dork Observation – ∏| !

Obviously some cultural and geographic issues at work — I don’t expect Singapore to be good at mexican food. But god help you find a decent burrito in Vancouver (or mexican in general), and pizza is pretty useless there.  But you can’t shake a stick and not hit good sushi — Vancouver has sushi density like the Mission has burritos, and the good sushi is really, really good.

Anyway, as prior discussions on Mission Mission attest, I’m a thin crust guy (aka elitist pizza snob) and I’m not thrilled with the quality of pizza in the city (Delfina Pizza excepted), so I usually make my own.

Fun as it is to take pictures of other people’s food, here’s my specialty, grilled pizza:

Obligatory panorama (click to zoom):

Ready to be sliced:

oddly shaped slices taste better:

if Hockney made pizza…

It’s pretty straight-forward:

1. pre-heat your grill, medium-high
2. prep toppings
3. roll dough very thin (I use whole foods, two pizzas to a bag of dough), maybe a foot in diameter
4. brush olive oil on one side
5. flip oily side on grill (this part is hard, takes practice, you will curse me – you may want a beer first)
6. brush olive oil on the new top side
7. may want to rotate (x-axis, yaw) after a couple of minutes to avoid hotspots if your bbq is wonky — peek underneath to see how it’s doing
8. drink more beer
9. wait for dough to start bubbling — should only have a few if any char marks underneath, decently crispy, but not too crispy
10. flip, add ingredients, non-solids first (I like tomato + quatro fromagio, or pesto + asiago, or the above, tomato + mozz + dollops of pesto flung from a spoon at moderate distance)
11. may want to lower heat a little so toppings don’t dry out
12. peek underneath, rotate if necessary, wait for nice grill marks
13. slice on random, radiating angles
14. eat quickly as it will not retain heat for long
15. make another one (don’t forget beer)