Victor's Pizzeria and Restaurant
1411 Polk Street
Tel: 415-885-1660
Victor's is one of my favorite pizza places in the City. It's been around as long as I can remember, and that's a long time. I remember ordering pizza's from Victor's when Sylvester was headlining across the street at the long gone Palm Nightclub. In those days few places offered delivery, and most of us drove to our favorite pizzeria and brought it home, letting it get limp in our own car rather than the delivery guy's vehicle.
The
recipes have remained constant while the place has been through at least
one change of ownership, and it still offers a really good thin crust
pie with a fine tomato sauce and unusually good ingredients at a fair
price. The pizza's are the backbone of Victor's, and for many years I
neglected even a cursory look at their regular menu, which is fairly broad,
priced right and again offers quality ingredients and generous portions.
From the street you see the pies being prepared in the traditional dough
tossing way, and they slice it and sell it from the front to walk away
with by the slice from $1.85 and up. Nothing is overpowering in a Victor's
Pizza. They execute a rhapsody of balance in serving a perfectly crisp
thin crust, mild, tangy sauce, just the right amount of good cheese, and
dozens of passerbys can be found walking up and down the 'strasse' munching
on this simple, robust health food day and night. Just beyond this early
version of an 'exposed' kitchen one finds two dining rooms. Straight back
from the street is a rustic, dark, booth lined dining room seating about
30, and to the right as one walks in is a simpler, less cluttered hodge
podge type dining room seating up to another 40. Here one finds the full
menu being served, and it's quite a good menu, with even better food being
delivered that one expects from many of our well reviewed Italian traittoria's
that are now so prevalent throughout the City. Service is spotty to say
the least, but the food's great, the prices are terrific, and the view
of 'Polkstrasse' can be riveting.
In addition to the pizzas and calzone's, Victor's offers a wide variety of pastas and sauces, you make the choice, and each comes with soup or salad and piping hot, fresh bread and butter. All pastas are $8.75 and well worth it. Pasta choices are fettuccine, linguine, cappelini, spaghetti or rigatoni, and the sauce choices are: marinara, bolognese, mushroom, alfredo, pesto or burro. I've tried each and they are all really good. In addition they offer six homemade 'stuffed' pastas, all served with the same choices as the pastas above at $8.95: cannelloni, lasagna, veggie lasagna, tortellini and beef or cheese ravioli. On the next page one finds: Veal served in a choice of picatta, scaloppini or parmigiana style at $11.95, or chicken served in a choice of marsala, parmigiana, milanese or scaloppini styles at $10.95. Reading on, we come to what they call their specialties: gnocchi bolognese or pesto; linguini with white or red clam sauce; eggplant parmigiana, cappelini puttanesca, linguini carbonara, linguini seafood or fettuccini primavera, all at $9.50 with the trimmings. They also offer five salads in addition to the basic dinner salad at $6.50, some excellent sandwiches served with soup or salad AND pasta at $6.95, a few side orders including perhaps the best garlic bread around, only one dessert (carrot cake at $2.50), a decent selection of beer and sodas and a mediocre Italian wine list.
I seldom give a mention this much ink, but I continue to be impressed with the wide variety of pastas, sauces and treatments that Victor's offers. The quality of everything they offer and the bargain basement prices. This is a great San Francisco neighborhood Italian restaurant that offers more than one of the great pizzas to be found hereabouts; it's a genuine trattoria, and I highly recommend it.
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