GIOIA/joy-a/Italian noun 1. a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.GIOIA is a New York Style Pizzeria with seasonal ingredients. We are an honest to goodness neighborhood restaurant. Our menu offers seasonal New York Style pizzas, house-made beef & pork meatballs, amazing chicken parm and meatball parm sandwiches, house-made chicken wings, salads, soft drinks and don’t forget our house-made cannoli for dessert!All made with the best of Californian ingredients. We don’t eat pizzas with a fork & knife. New Yorkers consider that uncivilized.We serve simple RUSTIC food with big flavors. We like that kind of honest food. We think it’s the kind of food you like!
Ray Kang
This is undoubtedly one of the best NYC style slices you’ll find in SF. The crust is outstanding with good structure, zero flop, nice chewy texture, and great flavor. The sauce is well balanced, leaning more savory than sweet. There’s a small table inside plus window seating. Lots of interesting toppings but my go to is the pepperoni slice and the mushroom (funghi) slice. They offer some great salads as well and for those of you who enjoy ranch with your pizza, definitely get a side of their homemade ranch. Highly recommend Gioia if you’re in the mood for a quick, affordable bite in Hayes Valley.
… moreDustin Sweet
Will Gioia has been killing the pizza game for over a decade. If you want a New York slice, this is the spot in SF. It’s a hole in the wall takeaway joint that does slices, pies, and fresh salads.
… moreKatia Martha
Great (but tiny) pizza spot! I tried & liked the funghi and Margherita pizza slices. The only thing I didn’t like was how some of the crust was blackened on certain pieces. I went with friends and maybe half of us had slices where the crust got burnt and we had to peel it off. Besides that, the pizza was good and I’d go back. The salads looked good as well but in my opinion, were too pricey for what they contained (not many toppings and no protein). Be prepared to stand outside and eat your slices or find somewhere else to sit down because if I recall correctly, this tiny space only had one indoor table with 2 chairs.
… moreShawn Hubble
Glorious slices of perfection,great options with wonderful combinations that’ll satisfy your taste buds’s every need when it comes to pizza.
… moreKiran Singh
Y’all, when I say hype is real I mean hype is REAL. Some of the best pizza I’ve had in SF. Hayes Valley is where it’s at. Got their classic Margherita pizza and their asparagus pesto (sounds interesting but tastes amazing) for their red sauce they use special plum tomato’s & it’s game changer. Fresh ingredients, great flavor & great customer service. They have a small seating area but mostly a grab & go spot. Very NY style. Also their Parmesan topping is fresh Parmesan! Fresh ingredients all around. Can’t wait to be back, cheers!
… moreDavi Gutkin
If you have a palette, or taste buds, the pizza here might give you an aneurysm. I bought 2 slices, more than $11 for 2 slices, and found the pizza to taste like it was 2 days old and then reheated in a nuclear reactor. Pizza to me is the ultimate staple good food, extremely easy to get a mediocre version. It’s almost skillful how a place like this can produce such a terrible slice of pizza. I don’t have much hope for their full pizzas either, at $28 for a 14”. It’s crazy what a quaint space in a busy neighborhood will get you in terms of the perception of quality, but I can assure you anyone professing the quality of the pizza here either had their taste buds surgically removed or is recovering from COVID.
… moreCynthia Wu
This has been my favorite pizza place for 10+ years (back when the funghi was LOADED), but something recently has changed. The pizza itself is still great, but it just seems like there are so many rules. Today I tried to use a gift card I got for my birthday, and found out it only works for online orders. So I went to order online, and I can only order whole pies, not slices. Ok, fine. They do half and half. But then you can only order certain kinds of pizza together for half and half. Ok, fine. I go through the whole order flow, then I forget to enter my gift card code, and try to cancel and re-order. They have trouble cancelling the order. Inside the store it takes ~30 minutes to figure it out. That’s fine.
In total with tax, tip, and the online ordering fee, even though we were picking up, it was ~$50 for pizza we didn’t really get to choose. But the cherry on top was when I asked for some olive oil, they tried to charge me for that too. Charging for olive oil crosses the line for me, that wasn’t the case here for years before and I have never seen another restaurant do that in my life.
… moreJoseph Klee
Solid slice and Cesar Salad. Pizza, fresh cheese, and the best sauce I’ve tasted in San Francisco. Good ingredients, good crust. Salad, lettuce is crisp, clean, and well-prepared. Friendly and helpful staff. 10/10
… moreA.C. Antonelli
I recently moved to SF from NYC (where the pizza comes from) and I’ve been avoiding pizza entirely since I got here because 1) I don’t like crying in public and 2) some of the pizza shops I’ve walked past here should be brought up on charges for tomato-related crimes. I don’t know I’m not a pizza lawyer. Anyway I finally caved, and I’ll be honest the folks at Gioia make some pretty solid pizza. Clearly fresh ingredients, good flavors, nice chewy crust, and decent prices. Guess this elitist New Yorker will have to find something else to complain about now.
… moreDylan Li
Very good margherita pizza all around, but a bit expensive. Nice cheese pull, soft and chewy crust, flavour on point
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