Dopo

Piedmont Avenue's dining corridor owes a measurable debt to what Jon Smulewitz built at 4293 Piedmont Ave. Dopo arrived as a neighborhood Italian restaurant with a sharper culinary point of view than the category usually implies: thin-crust pizza and house-made salumi anchored the menu, but the kitchen's orientation toward rustic Sicilian and Northern Italian cooking gave it range well beyond a standard pizzeria. Smulewitz came up through Oliveto, one of the Bay Area's more demanding Italian kitchens, and that training shows in the approach to charcuterie and pasta. The San Francisco Chronicle placed Dopo among the Bay Area's top 100 restaurants across multiple consecutive years between 2007 and 2012, a stretch of recognition that few neighborhood restaurants on Piedmont Avenue have matched. The format combined daily-changing tasting menus with à la carte options, which kept the kitchen responsive to seasonal availability and gave regulars a reason to return frequently. Antipasti, seafood, and pasta rotated alongside the more fixed anchors of pizza and salumi. Pricing sat in the mid-to-high range for the neighborhood, with some reviewers noting the portion-to-price ratio could feel tight on certain dishes, though the pizzas were generally considered fair value. That positioning reflects the kitchen's ambitions rather than any pretension about the room itself, which operated as a genuine local restaurant rather than a destination project. Smulewitz also opened Adesso, a salumi-focused bar on Grand Avenue that earned a James Beard Award nomination in its own right, underscoring the seriousness of the charcuterie program that ran through both projects.

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