Welcome to SDM’s Guide to Food + Drink, a series created to help you decide on where to eat in San Diego—curated by the team at San Diego Magazine.
Tribute Pizza is what happens if you took the best dirt candy from that week’s farmers market… sauteed it and pickled it and fermented it and marinated it and did all the ambitious things to it… lined it up in front of a fire oven… and started cranking out “tributes” to the most famous pizzas in U.S. pie culture. It’s pizza as the world’s best cover band. All served in a historic building that once helped our grandparents send love letters.
Tribute Pizza owner Matthew Lyons hustled. Born and raised in San Diego. Don’t want to call him an obsessive, just kinda lock-jaw fixated on the perfect pie as a core life pursuit. A food culture zealot. He showed enough dedication to the real art of it that iconic pizza chef Chris Bianco taught him a couple things, took him under his floury wing.
Matt started doing pop-ups around San Diego. Ended up taking a gig in Nairobi, helping open a world-class pizza shop. Then came home, and put an oven in this old post office in North Park.
They do many other things. They’ve got a killer charcuterie board. They make things out of thin air from their own creative heads. It’s just a special place of old mail and new bread.
The Things You Gotta Eat
Get the Bees Mode. All that hot honey and cured meat and godbread. Also get the vanilla soft-serve with olive oil (some weird is worth embracing).
