Type pizza near me into a map in San Francisco at eleven at night and the results will look encouraging. Most of them will be wrong. This is a city with genuinely excellent by-the-slice pizza and an unusually early closing culture around it — the majority of the best slice counters here shut at nine or nine thirty on a weeknight, which is roughly when people in other cities start thinking about a slice. The counters are worth planning around; the hours are the part that catches everyone out, and at least one of the famous names has quietly lost most of its branches.
Tell Karpo where you are and what time it is, and it comes back with which slice counters are still serving at that exact hour, how far you'd have to walk, and whether the branch you're thinking of is one of the ones that has closed.
Haight Street is quietly the best slice block in the city
The single most useful geographic fact about slices in San Francisco is that two of the city's serious counters sit about two blocks apart on the same street. Slice House by Tony Gemignani is at 1535 Haight Street and Escape from New York Pizza is at 1737 Haight Street. That is a short walk between a shop run under the name of a thirteen-time world pizza champion — offering New York, Detroit, grandma and Sicilian styles by the slice — and a New York-style veteran that has been feeding the neighborhood for decades. If you want to compare styles properly in one evening without crossing the city, this is the block to do it on. Hours at the Slice House location are worth confirming by phone before a late trip, as the chain's own site does not publish them in a readable form.
Golden Boy, North Beach: the square one, and the latest door
Golden Boy at 542 Green Street has been running since 1978 and sells the thick square-cut Sicilian-style focaccia slice that most people picture when they picture San Francisco pizza. It is also, usefully, the latest-closing counter in this guide: its own site lists 11:30am to 9pm Monday through Thursday, 11:30am to 11pm on Friday and Saturday, and 11:30am to 9pm on Sunday. Two things follow from that. First, on a Friday or Saturday it is the one that will still be open when the others have shut. Second — and this is the correction worth carrying — nine and eleven are not late. Golden Boy is routinely described online as a late-night institution, and relative to the rest of the city it is, but it closes long before the bars do. A post-last-call slice here is not a plan that works.
Escape from New York: two shops left out of five
This is the name most likely to send you to a locked door. Escape from New York Pizza once had a spread of locations across the city; three of them — on Harrison Street in SoMa, Polk Street, and 22nd Street in the Mission — have closed. What remains is Haight Street at 1737 and the Financial District shop at 333 Bush Street. If you are working from an older guide, or from memory, there is a real chance the branch in your head no longer exists. The Haight location's own site gives its hours as 10am to 9:30pm Monday to Thursday, 10am to 11pm Friday and Saturday, and 10am to 9:30pm on Sunday. Note that this contradicts the widely repeated claim that it serves until 2am — that figure appears across listings sites, but not on the restaurant's own page. Assume the earlier close.
Outta Sight: two shops, two genuinely different menus
Outta Sight Pizza started as a pop-up in 2020 and now runs two counters that are not interchangeable, which is the detail worth knowing. The Tenderloin shop at 422 Larkin Street is open 11am to 9pm seven days a week — the most consistent schedule in this entire guide, with no shortened weekend and no dark day, though it closes on most major holidays. The Chinatown shop at 643 Clay Street keeps shorter hours: 11am to 8pm Monday to Thursday, 11am to 9pm on Friday, and 11am to 8pm at weekends. More importantly the two kitchens run different specials — the Chinatown counter does peking duck and chicken shawarma pies that you will not find on Larkin Street. So the correct question is not whether to go to Outta Sight but which one, and the answer depends on what you want rather than which is nearer.
The closing-time map, which is the only map that matters
Order the evening by the earliest door. The Chinatown Outta Sight goes first at 8pm most nights. Then the Larkin Street shop and Golden Boy at 9pm on weeknights, with Escape from New York on Haight at 9:30pm. On a Friday or Saturday the picture improves but not dramatically: Escape from New York runs to 11pm and Golden Boy to 11pm, and that is the end of the evening. There is no by-the-slice option in this group that survives past eleven on any night of the week. If your plan involves a slice after a late film or a long dinner, buy it before you sit down, not after. The other habit worth forming is checking the day rather than the hour: several of these counters keep a shorter Sunday than Saturday, and the weekend extension at Golden Boy and Escape from New York applies to Friday and Saturday only. Sunday reverts to the weeknight schedule at both, which is the mistake people make on a long holiday weekend.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #PizzaNearMe #SFPizza #BytheSlice #GoldenBoyPizza #NorthBeach #HaightStreet #Tenderloin #Chinatown #SliceShop #SicilianSlice #NYStylePizza #SFEats #SFFood #PizzaGuide
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which slice counter is still open at the hour you're actually hungry, which branches have closed since the guide you're reading was written, and which of the two Haight Street shops suits what you feel like? Ask Karpo for current San Francisco pizza hours, the closures worth knowing about, and a walking route between North Beach, the Haight and the Tenderloin before you set off.
