Italian restaurant Vico Cavone will open this fall in the Castro, at 4248 18th Street. The space is the former home of longtime Castro staple Firewood Cafe, which closed in 2019 after 22 years in the neighborhood.
Vico Cavone will be a Neapolitan-style pizzeria, and is opening under Naples native Alessandro Raimondi, Sanaa Hams, and pizza chef Giancarlo Esposito.
Raimondi, who has worked as a server at fine dining Italian establishment Poesia, says that the new restaurant is named after the street where his father was born in Naples, Cavone, which is supposedly also home to the city’s oldest pizzeria.
Raimondi has lived and worked in the Bay Area for the past seven years, and says that moving to San Francisco has been a life-long dream. “I had an English teacher in high school back in Italy who showed me the Harvey Milk movie, and as a gay man, I thought, one day I’ll live there,” says Raimondi.
Now that Raimondi has made it to the city, the first-time restaurant owner wants to bring a taste of home to San Francisco’s streets. “I wanted to show San Francisco how Napoli people really eat,” says Raimondi. “You know, chicken parm isn’t really Italian.”
In lieu of Italian-American classics, the menu at Vico Cavone will feature Neapolitan pizza, pasta, and other specials, including a holiday menu reflective of Christmas in Naples, complete with a post-dinner game of Tombola (a game similar to Bingo that’s traditionally played on Christmas).
As self-declared pizza experts, we’ll be the first to tell you that Neapolitan pizza is the apex of all pizzas (we’ll save the Chicago vs. New York slice battle for second place for another day), so any news of a Neapolitan pizza joint — especially one owned and operated by a Napoli native — is music to our ears. Bring on the fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil. If we can’t spend our summer with a personal pie on the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, Vico Cavone will be the next best thing.
