Pausa

Steve Ugur learned to butcher in France. He came home to San Mateo, rebuilt his father's Italian restaurant, and got it certified by the state to cure its own meat. Thirteen or fourteen salumi rotate through the aging room. The pizza oven burns almond wood.

Why go

Ugur's father owned Spiedo, an Italian restaurant that held this address for decades, and Andrea Giuliani cooked in it.4 Ugur took the restaurant over in 2015. The two of them gutted it and reopened as Pausa in the first week of January 2017.3 6 Giuliani is from the Veneto and cooks it.1 Abbe Lewis reported for MICHELIN that year that Pausa was one of three restaurants state-certified to cure charcuterie on site.3 Dan Mussulman runs the aging room, thirteen or fourteen items at a time, after doing the same work at Trou Normand in San Francisco.3 Then there is the dough. Type 1, Type 2 and whole-grain flours come packaged for the restaurant in Italy. In 2017 both Lewis and Food Gal reported that no other American restaurant was buying them.3 6 It proofs in two stages over two hours, then goes into an oven burning almond wood.3 Food Gal found the crust charred in spots and tasting of that smoke.6 All of it happens in a glassed dough room at the back of the dining room, in view of the tables.3

Order this / avoid

Order: the cinghiale. The MICHELIN inspector rates the wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas as highly as the salumi, and picks that one, topped with wild boar sausage, artichoke and house-made mozzarella.1
Or the stracciatella pizza, which puts scallops and bottarga on stretched buffalo mozzarella. Peter-Astrid Kane reviewed it for SF Weekly in 2017 and wanted nothing added: For the first time in memory, I put red pepper flakes on something and immediately wished I hadn't. It needed nothing. She would have given it another 45 seconds in the oven to hold the center together.4
From the pasta side, the inspector takes the whole wheat ravioli with beef cheek, sheep ricotta and Swiss chard.1
Avoid: ordering the salumi board blind. Kane found it uneven in 2017, thin on the ciccioli and the porchetta and best on the prosciutto cotto, so ask what came out of the aging room this week.4

What locals & experts say

MICHELIN gave it a Bib Gourmand in 2017, and it was on the list again in 2025 and 2026.3 5 2
Adrienne Mitchel, covering the 2025 ceremony for Palo Alto Online, counted four Bib Gourmands at this end of the Peninsula: Pausa, Orchard City Kitchen in Campbell, The Bywater in Los Gatos and the new one, Eylan in Menlo Park. San Mateo's one star that night was Wakuriya.5
Peter-Astrid Kane, in SF Weekly two months after it opened, argued the suburb was what would save it. Ugur and Giuliani might do what many esteemed chefs in San Francisco have tried and failed: Open an elaborate restaurant with lots of moving parts, and keep it open.4
Ugur, to MICHELIN, on the pizza: From the flour to the slow proofing methods of the dough to the wood used in the oven, we are all very proud of our pizza here at Pausa.3
Food Gal ate here as a guest of the restaurant in February 2017 and found the porchetta poached and sliced thin, with no crackling on it at all.6

Good to know

Booking: online, and the room keeps a chef's table, a bar and an outdoor parklet.7
The wine list is all Italian.7
Getting there without a car. Kane timed it at 37 minutes on Caltrain from 4th and King to San Mateo Station, then a five-minute walk. Drivers get free parking after 6 p.m. in the garage next door.4

Verdict

should-visit — Book it, take the counter of the dining room that faces the dough room, and split a salumi board before the pizza. The Bib is the guide's from 2017 and it is on the list again in 2025 and 2026, and the one critic who wrote it up thought a suburb was the only place a kitchen this complicated could survive. What I cannot tell you is whether the kitchen still cooks that way. Nobody has gone back since 2017.