This is a guest feature from pizza enthusiast @SliceOfSF
Kristin Houk is special. For her entire life, she found meaningful work by way of aiding women in Guatemala in starting small businesses. Now, she is revitalizing her San Francisco neighborhood, the Bayview, with her delicious restaurants: Tato, a casual Mexican restaurant, and All Good Pizza. These two businesses support and inspire those around them to grow as a community, and it is beyond impressive.
Given the fact that Kristin is such a special individual, it would follow that her restaurants are as well. All Good Pizza showcases the breadth of Kristin’s life experience to date. She first moved to San Francisco from Iowa over 20 years ago, and immediately knew she’d found her home. While she spent over 10 years at Dolores Park Cafe, she also managed to spend about 10 years traveling back and forth between the Bay Area and Guatemala as the CEO of an organization aiding female entrepreneurs with advice and financing.
She also found time to live in Sienna, Italy for a while with a family that owned a pizzeria. While in Sienna, she learned some tricks of the trade and brought them back to California. Funny enough, her interest in pizza started with Arinell, a San Francisco staple, but the time she spent in Italy helped her hone her skills in a way that she likely would not have in the United States.
All Good Pizza was founded as Kristin’s passion project in 2011 as a lone Craigslist trailer, which some believed to be a front for drug dealers. Eventually the rumors ceased, and Kristin elicited the help of friends and neighbors to clear an abandoned lot on Jerrold Ave that is still the pizzeria’s home today. Floragrub Nursery decked it out with a variety of plants to set its space up and thus, All Good Pizza was poised for success. Today, it is still that same trailer with a beautiful, open, well-planted and ever-improving yard surrounding it.
From its inspiration and founding to its purpose, All Good Pizza is unlike any restaurant in the Bay Area. This begins and ends with Kristin. She aims to clean up the community, make awesome food, source from local producers (like Bayview Local), hire musicians and artists when possible, and ultimately enjoy what she does.
People like Kristin can teach us a lot about how to be better for ourselves and those around us. She makes her pizzeria work for her as well as well as those she cares about, rather than simply thinking financially, as many do. While All Good Pizza is just another example of the uniqueness of the pizza community, it is special enough to be the poster child. Come try it out for the pizza and stay for the people.
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