i love me some food → (food we love): La Cucina Italiana: North Beach!

oh, nbd, just chillin with a bunch of food network stars

Ciao! Today, for our weeklong intensive Italian cooking course, we headed down to SF's own North Beach to learn from the masters! We started at Tony's pizzeria, where we learned how to make some quality pizzas from TONY HIMSELF. He was like a walking God...with tattoos all the way up his arm, one could tell that he was in charge. He gave us a little talk about his own life and accomplishments (which there were plenty of), and then we had a little pizza making competition, judged by him! Now, foodies like me get rather starstruck at the prospect of the food network's presence. The walls of Tony's were FULL of photos of him posing with Jay Leno, Rachel Ray, and Guy Fietti!! There was even a medal on the wall presented by the food network itself! As I said, he is A WALKING GOD.

like a boss

Anyways, back to the food. Upon arrival, he brought us out a bunch of fresh, hot, complimentary pizza. It was simple, with cheese, herbs, a delicious crust and....get this....HONEY drizzled on top. Something I'd never even heard of, but it was incredible.
After that, we got to learn how to toss some pizza dough! I'm happy to say that I can now create a much better pizza crust than I have in the past. The tossing of the dough was fun, and then it turned into a competition. We split up into groups and got presented with an array of toppings. EVERYTHING, from sausage to pancetta, to mozzarella and mascarpone, to basil, pesto, peppers, mushrooms, and YES, even honey.

Our teams were judged based upon presentation and creativity, as well as the combination of ingredients. Our pizza had a simple marinara sauce with sausage, pancetta, pepperoni, peppers, basil, parmesan....it was delicious! but unfortunately did not win...

the competition was fierce...

ps, we should've won

After spending only an hour (wish we had more time!) cooking pizzas with the master, we got to tour around North Beach like the tourists we really are!

aka, eat gelato and go to some "landmark" buildings around north beach...