Why a nationally acclaimed Bay Area pizza chef is shutting down his restaurant to focus on frozen pies
Pizza cooking in the oven at Del Popolo in San Francisco in 2016. (John Storey John Storey/Special to the Chronicle)
Critics ranked Del Popolo's Neapolitan pizzas among the best in the city, if not the country, and raved about its natural wines and vegetable sides, while night after night, fans filled its dark, moody dining room that directed all attention to the wood-fired oven in the center.
So why is owner Jon Darsky giving it up?
After 10 years, Darsky will close his acclaimed San Francisco restaurant following service tonight - and not for the usual reasons that befall so many Bay Area restaurants. Instead, Darsky has chosen to focus on the frozen pizza business he launched during the pandemic, intending to turn it into a national brand.
"I see an opportunity. It's interesting to me," Darsky said of his goal to make restaurant-quality pizza available to home kitchens across the country - a frozen product he dares to call "authentic."
"I feel like that's a really cool mission to be on," he said. "I'm not changing the world, but I think it's honest and real. And I think I know how to do it."
Chefs Jon Darsky, right, and Jeffrey Hayden at Del Popolo in San Francisco in 2016. (John Storey John Storey/Special to the Chronicle)
Darsky sat down for an interview at the restaurant this week, the first time he has spoken publicly about the closure since announcing it on social media in March. The decision doesn't come without ambivalence or sadness, especially now that he has to say goodbye to regulars and to employees that have become like family. "I don't know if I had allowed myself to really feel that before," he said.
Darsky said he had to make a choice about quality of life. In 2019, he, his wife and their two young sons moved to Los Angeles, where his wife works and has family. He commutes back and forth every one or two weeks to oversee the restaurant and the frozen pizza production in a SoMa facility. Keeping the restaurant growing would require expanding its hours and hiring more employees, or he could push forward with the pizza brand - while also finding time to spend with his wife and two boys, now 11 and 13. "Something gets shorted on either side," he said. "It ends up being just very messy, and difficult, and sometimes I get disappointed in myself for not figuring that out better."
Previously a pizzaiolo at Flour + Water restaurant, Darsky launched Del Popolo in 2012 as a food truck - a shipping container on wheels that Darsky outfitted with glass walls and a pizza oven. It attracted a following for "expertly crafted pies" that "compete with those emerging from the city's best pizzerias," the Chronicle said at the time. In 2015, he opened the restaurant, which made the Chronicle's Top 100 Restaurants for four years in a row; landed on a prestigious list of the 50 Top Pizza restaurants in the U.S. in 2022; and was on the Michelin Guide's Bib Gourmand list, whose inspectors described Del Popolo's pizza crusts as "chewy, blistered and deliciously caramelized."
The margherita pizza at Del Popolo in San Francisco, seen in 2016. (John Storey John Storey/Special to the Chronicle)
Darsky began selling Del Popolo frozen pizza in 2020, joining other acclaimed pizzerias across the country who went in a similar direction during the pandemic. It makes four styles: margherita; potato and rosemary; mushroom and thyme; and pepperoni, which retail at around $15 to $17. The product is now sold in more than 100 grocery stores in the Bay Area, Southern California, Arizona and Nevada. In January, its margherita pizza won a Chronicle taste test of frozen pizzas produced by Bay Area restaurants.
Darsky said he's driven by a desire to improve upon the frozen pizza options currently available across the country, though there are competitors like Genio Della Pizza, a national brand launched by Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana in New York (and formerly San Francisco). "I go through the supermarket and I'm like, ‘man, we could do better,'" Darsky said.
Del Popolo frozen pizzas are cooked on a rotating deck oven that's fueled by gas and wood, making it slightly different from the restaurant's traditional oven. But overall, he considers them the same quality, with a soft and pliable crust that comes from short cooking on high heat - made slightly crisper when reheated in a home oven.
Janelle Bitker of the San Francisco Chronicle slides a Del Popolo frozen pizza into the oven. (Kristen Murakoshi/For the S.F. Chronicle)
To expand nationwide, he will need investors to provide millions of dollars, he said. The SoMa facility is only 2,500 square feet in size, and he'll need one many times larger, along with different machines and freezers. He also needs to make production much more efficient; each pizza currently costs about $5.50 to produce, which he wants to get down to $4, he said. (The retail price reflects costs added on by distributors and stores.) Right now, the margins are no better than the restaurant industry's notoriously thin ones, but they should improve eventually, Darsky said.
Finding a new production facility will likely mean moving to another part of the Bay Area or California or even out of state, since real estate and energy costs are so high here, he said. Yet the high cost of doing business in San Francisco was not a big factor in his decision to close the restaurant, he said.
Darsky has seen ebbs and flows of pizza trends in the Bay Area, with the wave of Neapolitan-style pizzas he joined in the 2010s followed by a reverence for Detroit-style pies and now more of an East Coast influence with popular places including June's Pizza in Oakland and Jules and Outta Sight in San Francisco. "At a certain point, we'll see some kind of shift to something else," he said, including possibly another renaissance of Neapolitan pizza.
Right now, Darsky is saying goodbye to regulars from the food truck and the pizzeria who are coming by for one more meal. "I'm just sad but excited at the same time. This was a meaningful part of my life," he said.
