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Our fourth annual Peninsula Restaurant Week is here! Through Saturday, April 27, celebrate the Peninsula’s restaurant scene with special prix fixe menus and offers at dozens of local eateries. I’m catching up with three restaurateurs participating in Peninsula Restaurant Week. This is the final interview in this year’s series. Previously, I spoke with Oh Honey Macaron owner Kelly Liu about the inspiration behind her unique macarons and Bistro Vida owner Ali El Safy about a new cocktail bar he’s opening next door to his Menlo Park restaurant.
For more information on Peninsula Restaurant Week, go to peninsularestaurantweek.com.
Craig and Annie Stoll decided to open a restaurant together on their second date.
One year later in 1998, Delfina in San Francisco opened for business, serving up California-Italian fare. Then in 2005, the couple – with Craig in the kitchen and Annie in the front-of-the-house – opened their first Pizzeria Delfina on California Street in San Francisco, and in 2008, Craig won the James Beard Award for best chef. Since then, they’ve opened an additional four pizzerias (one closed in in 2020 with the pandemic), including one in Burlingame and one in Palo Alto.
For Peninsula Restaurant Week, Pizzeria Delfina in Burlingame and Palo Alto are both offering a $45 prix fixe three-course menu, featuring insalata primavera (little gem lettuce, radishes, lentils, asparagus, pea shoots and green goddess dressing) as the appetizer, a choice between carciofi pie (made with artichokes, mozzarella, arugula, ricotta salata and gremolata) and Delfina’s housemade potato gnocchi (with English peas, prosciutto cotto and fresh herb buro fuso) for the main, and fior di latte soft serve (with roasted strawberries and rhubarb conserva) as the dessert.
I talked with Craig and Annie to learn about their respective journeys into the food and beverage industry, their passion for Italian cuisine and an upcoming change to Pizzeria Delfina. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Peninsula Foodist: How did you both get into the restaurant industry?
Annie Stoll: I grew up outside Philadelphia, and my mom was a great cook. And she took me out for my 12th birthday to this place in the ‘70s called the Knave of Hearts, and it was white tablecloths, and they served me cold strawberry soup. And I just fell in love with service at a young age, and I loved going to restaurants. And so I went to college for hotel restaurant management at Penn State. I graduated from Penn State, and then I started managing restaurants…and then moved here in 1990, and was managing just with the hopes of always opening my own restaurant. But I’m a front-of-the-house person. I’m a hospitality person, and I knew I needed a chef partner. So I was searching for that and getting experience and met Craig.
Craig Stoll: I’m from New York. I started washing dishes in high school so I had money for car payments so I could date girls. That was the sum total of my drive, I think, at that point. But I just fell in love with it. It’s like instant gratification – there was fire, they gave me beer after work, everyone drank. I loved it.
I also came from a hardcore foodie family before that term was ever invented. I grew up just outside of the city, and my parents were wannabe hippies. So we belonged to a food co-op in the ‘70s in Westchester, and they’d take us out to eat all over the city. I fell in love with it. I ended up going to culinary school right out of high school and went back and got a bachelor’s in hospitality management (at Florida International University). And I moved out here in ‘88 and started working for a really famous chef at the time in San Francisco. I just worked my way around the city and got another cook job and got a sous chef job and bounced around. And then I got an opportunity to go to a beady, guinea pig group of this cooking school in Torino, Italy. And then I spent three months in this Stalin-era conference center up on a hill in Torino and got a job at a restaurant named Da Delfina in Tuscany. I like to say that it’s like central casting for small Tuscan village. It was surrounded by olive groves and vineyards, and I slept in a little room under the restaurant. It was an amazing experience, obviously, to inspire us years later. I came back to the Bay Area, got a sous chef job, a chef job, just bounced around until I met Annie. We were both working in Mill Valley across the street from each other, and we started dating. And then on our second date, we decided to open a restaurant together.
Peninsula Foodist: Did you pick the name Delfina because of Da Delfina in Tuscany?
Craig Stoll: Yeah, it was a woman’s name. Delfina was Nona, the grandma. And she was in her 80s when I was there, so she’s long gone. Her son Carlo still runs the restaurant to this day.
Peninsula Foodist: How would you describe the style of pizza you serve at Pizzeria Delfina?
Craig Stoll: New York meets Naples. Some people might call it Neo-Neapolitan. What we want is a really well-developed, airy cornicione, which is the crust, the edge, with a firm enough center of the crust to hold toppings and cheese, etc. Not too long after we opened Delfina, we went to Naples and spent some time working there and staging at various places. We had had pizza in Italy, but hadn’t spent solid time on the ground in Naples. And that’s when we fell in love with it. And that was just mind-blowing. I couldn’t stop cramming buffalo mozzarella in my face and just could not stop eating pizza after pizza after pizza.
Peninsula Foodist: What is the most popular dish on your menu, and what makes it so special?
Annie Stoll: Our biggest seller is the margherita pizza and the meatballs.
Craig Stoll: They’re everything you want in a meatball. A lot of our food, we don’t trick it out. There’s no green peppercorns or lemongrass or black truffle or something funky in there. It’s a classic meatball. It’s three meats and onions and breadcrumbs and ricotta, and it’s braised in a great tomato sauce with pork ribs in it to give it a little more depth of flavor. For the margherita pizza, it’s the crust that I went on about at great length, and it’s a great tomato sauce, which is not really tomato sauce. It’s just raw canned tomato that’s got a little olive oil in it, teeny touch of raw garlic in it and salt, which is how margarita pizza is made, and some good fresh local mozzarella from Belfiore in Berkeley and some torn basil.
Annie Stoll: Only a couple of pieces.
Craig Stoll: Some people get upset that there’s not more basil.
Annie Stoll: There’s not supposed to be.
Craig Stoll: You get two torn pieces. That’s the way they do it in Naples. It’s not a topping; it’s an aromatic.
Peninsula Foodist: Are there any upcoming changes at Pizzeria Delfina?
Craig Stoll: At the end of the month, we will get the first batch of our custom flour blend that we had developed for us. It’s an all-American grown, organic, custom milled flour from Central Milling that we’re switching to. We were using Caputo that is milled in Naples, but they get their grain from all over the world. They get North American grain, they get grain from Russia and Ukraine and all over the place, and then they mill it there in Naples, which we visited a few times, and then they ship back out across the world, so the carbon footprint is ridiculous. It’s worse than importing water from Italy, which we don’t do.
Peninsula Foodist: How will the change in flour impact the taste?
Craig Stoll: It’ll be better. It’s incredible. Because of the protein content, we’re able to push the hydration even more than it is, which will result in a lighter, more developed edge (cornicione). Also, this adds a little bit higher ash content, so a little more whole wheat in it. It’s not a whole wheat crust, but there is more whole wheat in it, which is going to even develop the flavor more.
Peninsula Foodist: What do you aim to achieve with Pizzeria Delfina?
Annie Stoll: As cliche as it is, to have a place for people to go, home away from home, where they feel really taken care of by authentic, genuine, knowledgeable service.
Craig Stoll: Delfina itself was never meant to be a destination restaurant: It was meant to be a neighborhood trattoria. At all our places, really, but I could speak most to Delfina because that was our baby. We’ve got people who had their first date there and are now married with kids, and they come back and they want to show their kids where they first dated, and then their kids come and work for us. People work for us and meet and get married and they start their own restaurants. But it’s such a human business, and it’s full of so much more than business transactions. Feeding people is a really intimate thing, and the way we practice it gives us so many connections beyond the guests, with our vendors and our farms and our staff. It’s a good life. It makes our lives rich. And I think it does the same for the people who get to know us…We just want to share our love and passion for what we do with people, and hopefully they dig it.
Peninsula Foodist: Are you planning to open more Pizzeria Delfinas?
Annie Stoll: We’ve never sat down and said, “We’re going to open seven restaurants in this many years.” Everything just has come organically, like opportunities and things like that. If the right opportunity came around, we may. Craig’s extremely creative and gets extremely excited about different projects. Me, I’m like, “I’m 60, and it might be time to slow down a little bit.” So we’re not completely on the same page. We’re not sure.
Pizzeria Delfina Burlingame, 1444 Burlingame Ave., Burlingame; 650-288-1041. Open Monday through Thursday 5-8 p.m., Friday and Saturday noon to 9 p.m. and Sunday noon to 8 p.m. Instagram: @pizzeriadelfina.
Pizzeria Delfina Palo Alto, 651 Emerson St., Palo Alto; 650-353-2208. Open Monday through Thursday 5-9 p.m., Friday and Saturday noon to 10 p.m. and Sunday noon to 9 p.m. Instagram: @pizzeriadelfina.