Search the best deep dish pizza in Chicago from a hotel room in San Francisco and you will get four hundred words about Lou Malnati's, a flight quote, and nothing you can eat tonight. The honest answer is that San Francisco never tried to out-Chicago Chicago. What it did instead, starting around 2019, was quietly turn into one of the strongest square-pizza cities in the country: Detroit-style pans with cheese welded to the rim, cut into rectangles, sold by the pan and by the slice. These are not novelty items bolted onto a Neapolitan menu. For several of these kitchens the pan is the entire business. What follows is a ranking, but not by taste. It is ranked by how hard the pan is to actually get into your hands on a given night, because that is the variable every other list leaves out.
Square pans run on schedules that change by location, by day, and sometimes by a single weekday. Half of these kitchens stop taking food orders before the room closes. Tell Karpo where you are and when you'll be free, and it will tell you which pan is still going into an oven.
Why San Francisco went square instead of deep
The two styles are mechanically different animals. Chicago deep dish is a tall, buttery, often cornmeal-laced wall of dough pressed into a seasoned pan, layered cheese-first with chunky tomato on top, and baked long — closer to forty-five minutes than fifteen. Detroit-style uses a shallower rectangular pan, pushes shredded cheese all the way to the metal so it fries into a lacquered edge, ladles sauce over the top in stripes, and comes out in a fraction of the time. That time difference is the whole reason San Francisco adopted one and not the other. A square pan fits restaurant ticket times, survives a delivery bag, and can be sold as a single slice at a counter. A forty-five-minute deep dish cannot do any of those things well. The clearest signal of the shift came when Capo's, North Beach's Chicago-style room, reopened with Detroit-style pushed to the front of a menu that had been built on deep dish and cracker-thin.
1. Square Pie Guys — the pan you can get without a plan
The original brick-and-mortar sits at 1077 Mission St. in SoMa, at Seventh, and it is open 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Ordering runs through the website, the app, or the counter. If you have exactly one night in the city and no appetite for logistics, this is the one — the hours are the widest of anything on this list and there is no single-day window to miss. Worth knowing for context: this started as a pop-up and has since gone from three locations to six-plus, adding Berkeley, Campbell in August 2025 and Walnut Creek in January 2026, with Palo Alto announced. The mothership is still the SoMa room.
2. Joyride Pizza — the square that outlasts the bar
Joyride runs Detroit-style out of a spread of San Francisco counters, and the hours are the reason it belongs here. The Mission shop at 411 Valencia St. goes to 11 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday, midnight Thursday, and 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday. The 685 Market St. counter goes later still — 2 a.m. Friday and 2:30 a.m. Saturday. That quietly demolishes the received wisdom that San Francisco has nothing worth eating after the bars let out. In the other direction, the Pier 1 location on the Embarcadero opens at 7:30 a.m., which makes square pizza a breakfast option if you want it to be. There are daytime-only outposts too: Yerba Buena Gardens at 730 Howard St. runs noon to 7 p.m. daily, and the Salesforce Park counter at 425 Mission St., level four, runs 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday in a partnership with Barebottle. There is also a counter inside the bowling center at 750 Folsom St. Check which door you are walking toward, because they are not interchangeable.
3. Cellarmaker House of Pizza — the pan built around the beer
3193 Mission St., in the stretch below Cesar Chavez, is a brewery that happens to make excellent Detroit-style squares rather than a pizzeria that happens to pour beer. Hours are 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and Sunday, and noon to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Here is the rule that catches people: the kitchen closes thirty minutes before the room does. Walk in at 8:45 on a Tuesday and you are drinking, not eating. Reservations go through Toast's booking system and walk-ins are taken during service. If you want the beer program and the pan in the same sitting on a weeknight, aim for 6:30, not 8:30.
4. Capo's — Chicago and Detroit in the same room
641 Vallejo St. in North Beach is the one address in San Francisco where you can put Chicago deep dish, Chicago stuffed, cracker-thin tavern style and a Detroit-style pan on the same table and settle the argument yourself. It is also the most constrained schedule on this list. Capo's is closed Monday and Tuesday. On the days it does open, the doors go up at 4:30 p.m. — there is no lunch service — and it runs to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, and 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The plan where you grab a deep dish at noon before an afternoon flight simply does not exist here, and a surprising number of aggregator listings still imply that it does.
5. Long Bridge Pizza Co. — the square with a one-day window
2347 3rd St. in Dogpatch is mostly a sourdough thin-crust shop, open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Mondays. The Detroit-style squares — mozzarella and cheddar blended so the edges crisp into the pan — run on Thursdays only. Sandwiches are a Wednesday thing. This is the hardest square in the city to accidentally eat, which is exactly why it is worth the calendar entry. One practical note from their own ordering page: delivery orders cannot be placed over the phone, only online through Toast, so do not call and expect a driver.
What the Chicago comparison actually gets wrong
If what you want is literal Chicago deep dish and not a square substitute, San Francisco has two credible rooms: Capo's, above, and Little Star Valencia at 400 Valencia St., open 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, still building the cornmeal-crust deep dish the brand made its name on in 2004. Two corrections before you trust an older list, though. Little Star's original Divisadero room closed at the end of 2023 after nineteen years, so Valencia is the San Francisco location, not one of two. And Del Popolo, the 855 Bush St. institution that appears on nearly every San Francisco pizza roundup written before this spring, closed permanently on May 8, 2026 after a decade, pivoting into frozen retail pies. Neither of those is deep dish, but both are still being recommended by lists that have not been re-reported.
Cellarmaker and Capo's both run serious beer and whiskey programs, and a square pan is very good at making a third round feel reasonable. Drink responsibly and sort out your ride before you order it.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #BestDeepDishPizzaInChicago #DetroitStylePizza #SquarePieGuys #JoyridePizza #CellarmakerHouseOfPizza #Capos #LongBridgePizza #SoMa #Dogpatch
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Ask Karpo first
Every fact above has a shelf life. Kitchens shift their last-order cutoff by half an hour, a Thursday-only special gets moved to Friday, a location closes for a private buyout, and the roundup you are reading was written eighteen months ago by someone who never called. Pizza is especially bad for this because so much of the information lives in a counter's head rather than on a website. Karpo lives in iMessage, checks the current state of things before it answers, and will tell you plainly when a place is closed tonight instead of sending you across town to find out. Ask it which square is still coming out of an oven near you, and go from there.
