Ocean Pizza Restaurant in San Francisco, California: A Restaurant Review

Little family-owned restaurant operations usually break one of two ways. Either they are a labor of love undertaken by a (usually immigrant) family who enjoy what they do and pour themselves into the food, the interior and the service, which takes a lot of work and doesn't always offer the greatest profit margins, but turns a restaurant into a beloved neighborhood institution that does decently in both good times and bad because the people who frequent it consider it a part of their life and a part of their community. The other way these restaurants go is to either come in from the very beginning thinking only about money, or to become very cynical after operating for a little while and seeing how much work is involved in running a restaurant, and just having the attitude of squeezing the area around them for as much as possible and taking out their bitterness at their frustrated dreams of getting rich quick on the clientele. We've got plenty of both of these sorts of little mom and pop operations here in San Francisco, and unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that Ocean Pizza Restaurant is one of the latter. That's the vibe I get from it, anyway, and lawd knows I've been to plenty of places like it.

The place deals in delivery and pick-up for the most part, serving only whole pies and a variety of seemingly random other types of meals. There is some seating inside, but it is fairly small, and the overall cleanliness suggests they don't care all that much about your dining experience. Pizza by the slice is not available, the only nearby outlet for that is a little farther down Ocean Avenue at Mr. Pizza Man.

Pizza pricing is moderate for the city, but not a particularly good deal, and the quality is middling at absolute best. A regular cheese pizza runs you a little short of ten dollars for a small, with increments of about two dollars for each larger size up to the Extra Large at fifteen bucks. Combo pizzas run about thirteen to twenty-two dollars and there's a pretty limited selection - Hawaiian, Greek, vegetarian, all meat, chicken ranch and a couple of others. On the side you can grab the soup of the day, fries, bread with cheese or butter, sliced mushrooms, garlic tomatoes, meatballs, spaghetti, wings or calamari ranging from about two bucks to seven bucks. Beverages are just the usual range of canned and bottled stuff, but notable is that they don't seem to offer two liters of soda.

We haven't gotten adventurous enough to try anything else on the menu besides standard pizza and pasta, but the range of other items on offer includes steak, sandwiches, omelettes, pancakes and French toast. I'm still not clear on whether the breakfast items are served all day or only early on, but they don't seem to be open until lunchtime or so.

It's basically mediocre food at a slightly high price, for those who are desperate in this restaurant-lacking area for either delivery or a sit-down meal. As such it isn't too offensive, but the curt service, low-budget quality of the ingredients and the poorly kept interior just turns me off too much to go back to this one.

Ocean Pizza Restaurant
1443 Ocean Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112
# 415-586-3045
http://www.sfoceanpizza.com/