San Francisco pizza superstar Tony Gemignani opens Folsom restaurant, with 3 more to come
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The Bay Area’s preeminent pizzaiolo — Italian for pizzamaker — is opening multiple Sacramento-area restaurants, starting in Folsom on Saturday morning.
Slice House by Tony Gemignani will open at 11 a.m. Saturday at 3210 E. Bidwell St., Suite 100 in The Shops at Folsom Ranch, the commercial side of a 3,585-acre development south of Highway 50.
Gemignani isn’t stopping in Folsom, either. Slice House locations are also planned for Sacramento, Elk Grove and Roseville, though franchisees have yet to nail down exact locations, he said.
Run by franchisee Sandeep Gill, Slice House in Folsom will make pizzas in a variety of styles, including the trendy Detroit (thick, rectangular crust with sauce on top of cheese), New York (thin and wide with a soft bottom and crunchy edge), Sicilian (airy, rectangular crust slightly thinner than Detroit-style) and Grandma (rectangular and thinner than Sicilian-style).
“Nowadays when you’re looking at Facebook or Instagram, you’re looking at all the options of pizza out there. We kind of have that here,” Gemignani said.
The fast-casual restaurants’ cooks will also make fresh pasta as well as salads, wings, meatball sub sandwiches and other pizza parlor bites. There will be locally-produced beers and natural wines, and gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan pizza options.
Slice House marks Gemignani’s first professional foray back into the Sacramento area since he co-founded Pizza Rock, a downtown Sacramento pizzeria that had the misfortune of being in an expansive K Street building during the COVID-19 pandemic. It closed in July 2020, a period that Gemignani said prompted him to rethink his business strategy.
“I have pizzerias all over, from 9,000-square foot pizzerias in Las Vegas to a full-service restaurant in San Francisco (Tony’s Pizza Napoletana) and smaller slice houses. When COVID hit, some did extremely well and some didn’t,” Gemignani said. “The ones that did really well and were almost COVID-proof were the slice houses.”
Gemignani got his start at his brother’s Castro Valley restaurant, where his acrobatic dough-tossing skills wowed customers — and soon, judges. He was crowned the world’s top pizza-thrower eight times between 1995-2007, and holds the Guiness World Record for largest pizza base spun for two minutes (36.5 inches).
How’s the taste? Well, Gemignani became the first American to win the Naples-based World Pizza Cup in 2007. He’s won five world championships for his pizza-making in addition to the eight for throwing, and ran a pizza school in San Francisco until last year.
Gemignani’s parents moved to Roseville roughly 20 years ago, and his father Frank coached soccer at Granite Bay High School. About a dozen of Gemignani’s former classmates from Washington High School in Fremont separately stopped by the Folsom restaurant in the week before it opened, he said.
“A lot of people I grew up with in the Bay Area moved out here,” Gemignani said. “Coming out here, you see a lot of Bay Area transplants. People from Fremont, from Castro Valley, from San Francisco, they come out this direction. There (are) a lot of people I know that used to frequent my pizzerias in the Bay Area. It’s a great community, and it’s growing.”
More than 100 Slice Houses are either open or under development, meaning franchisees have claimed the territories but yet to find their exact building, across California, Nevada, Colorado and Texas. Folsom will be the 10th location to open; the original launched in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in 2010.
The Folsom restaurant will be open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., with indoor seating for 20 and patio seating for another 40. Slice House will hire about 30 full- or part-time employees.
