Fiorella (Clement Street)

Fiorella opened on Clement Street in the Outer Richmond in 2015, the first restaurant from Boris Nemchenok and Brandon Gillis, and the group has since grown to four San Francisco locations in the Sunset, Noe Valley and on Polk Street. The Clement Street room established the format the others follow: a California-inflected Italian menu of wood-fired pizzas, house-made pasta, antipasti and seasonal plates, served in a neighbourhood dining room decorated with murals of local figures. It is a short walk from Ocean Beach Cafe at the western end of the Richmond, and dinner runs seven nights a week with lunch added at weekends.

The alcohol-free drinking here is smaller in scale than at the group's Sunset and Noe Valley restaurants, but it is real and it is on the printed beverage menu rather than available only on request. The cocktail card lists five drinks, and the last of them, Like a Virgin, is marked N/A: prickly pear essence, fresh lime juice, sparkling water and mint, at $14, the same price as the house negroni, the Passione Margarita and the Sanguine Spritz above it. The beer list carries Best Day Brewing's non-alcoholic Hazy IPA at $6 — Best Day is brewed across the bay in Sausalito — alongside Ghost Town's pilsner and IPA and Far West's Nu Dry cider, and at $6 the alcohol-free beer is the least expensive beer on the list rather than a premium-priced substitute. Non-alcoholic beverages otherwise run to sparkling water, Tejava iced tea, house lemonade and Linea coffee. For a neighbourhood Italian restaurant in a part of the city with very little zero-proof provision, that combination is a step above the usual soda gun. The group's Sunset restaurant runs a longer alcohol-free list, including a Noperol Spritz and an N/A Lucano Old Fashioned, so guests who want a deeper choice from the same kitchen have that option a few blocks south; the Clement Street room is the one to book for the original dining room and the neighbourhood it was built for.