Best Chicken Parm in San Francisco, CA

Chicken parm in San Francisco, CA: our top picks

North Beach is where Italian San Francisco took root. The neighborhood was settled largely by northern Italians, and rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake and fire drew still more. P.G. Molinari, who came from Piedmont, was in the salame business by 1896, and Molinari Delicatessen still holds down 373 Columbus Avenue. Cioppino came from the same streets: Italian fishermen, many of them from Genoa, worked off the waterfront, and their stew turned up in print in 1901 under the name "chespini." Tommaso’s on Kearny Street has been baking in a wood-fired brick oven since 1935, when the Neapolitan Cantalupo family opened it as Lupo’s.

Red-sauce San Francisco never required an Italian passport. Original Joe’s was founded in 1937 by Ante "Tony" Rodin, a Croatian immigrant, as a 14-stool counter on Taylor Street in the Tenderloin. A 2007 fire closed that room, and his grandchildren reopened in 2012 at 601 Union Street in North Beach, where Fior d’Italia and Joe DiMaggio’s used to be. Chicken parmigiana is one of the house signatures.

For something more Roman, Roma Antica sits at Scott and Chestnut in the Marina. Roberto Sbaraglia, whose father ran a restaurant called Antica in Rome, opened it in 2017 with Dogukan Solmaz, a friend from hospitality school. Next to the carbonara and pinsa, the menu has listed melanzane alla parmigiana and a breaded chicken parmigiana with rigatoni.

Piccolo Forno is a small spot on Columbus at Greenwich, where North Beach shades into Russian Hill, making its own pizzas and pastas. Across town in Dogpatch, Marcella’s Lasagneria is a family business with roots in Abruzzo. It started out as a caterer, and Gianfranco Di Sciullo turned it into a lasagna shop in 2008. Eggplant is one of its lasagnas: a close cousin of parm rather than the thing itself.

1. Sodini's Trattoria (San Francisco) — Parm Score 73. Chicken parm comes up in 1 of the recent Google reviews we sampled, and the tone is positive. 4.5 on Google across 982 reviews.
2. Roma Antica (San Francisco) — Parm Score 70. Chicken parm is on the restaurant’s own menu (checked November 2026). 4.5 on Google across 1,830 reviews.
3. Piccolo Forno (San Francisco) — Parm Score 62. No chicken parm mentions in the reviews we sampled yet, so it ranks on overall quality. 4.7 on Google across 2,473 reviews.

We ranked 15 restaurants within 10 miles of San Francisco, CA. 2 of them have the parm confirmed, by reviewers or on their own menu, and Parm Scores run from 56 to 73. Confirmed places rank first; the rest are well-reviewed Italian spots where the parm is not yet confirmed, and pizzerias and steakhouses need a mention to appear at all. How Parm Score works.

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