A Taste of Naples at Pizzeria Delfina

I've been hearing great things about Pizzeria Delfina since I moved to San Francisco. I live by the location on Fillmore and California Street. The chefs also own Delfina in the Mission. They don't take reservations and every time we've tried to go, there's about an hour wait. After hearing for months how amazing it is, we bit the bullet, put our names on the chalkboard wait list grabbed some drinks and studied the menu. Pizzeria Delfina is authentic Southern Italian food, so the menu and wine list were a little confusing a first. I'll be honest, we had to Google a couple things to figure out what they were. I'll be honest, I'm a bit of a wino and I didn't recognize any of the wines on the menu. They're all wines from Southern Italy. After taking a stab and ordering the Salice Salentino Riserva and the Aglianico and not being huge fans of either, I finally asked the server to breakdown the wine options for me. 

After 45 minutes of waiting, we were seated at one of the outside tables, which was luckily under a heat lamp. For an appetizer we ordered the fresh stretch mozzarella, which came with some toasted baguette and arugula. The mozzarella was soft and fresh, perhaps the best I've ever had. For the main course, we ordered two of the Neapolitan style pizzas. After reading the Yelp reviews, it was clear that one of our choices had to be the prosciutto pie. On top of their famous crust, there's mozzarella, caicocavallo (cheese), panna (cream), prosciutto and fresh arugula leaves. For the other pizza, we opted for the Panna, which is tomato sauce, cream, basil and shaved parmigiano. Since there was no meat on this one, we added the fennel sausage. The pizza took a while to come (I have the sneaking suspicion our server forgot to put our order in since the table next to us ordered after us an were almost done eating by the time our pizza came). Once it did though, it was quite tasty. The ingredients are all super fresh and the flavors are unique. They're larger than I thought they were though, so we probably didn't need to order two.

Overall, it was worth the wait. The food was pretty delicious. However, the wait was too long and the service sucked. We saw quite a few people coming to pick up takeout orders, so I think that's the route we'll go next time. The menu prices are fair. If I ever eat in-restaurant again, I'm going to do some research on southern Italian wines beforehand so I know what to order.