Clementina: SF's First Celiac-Safe Italian Restaurant

Families navigating celiac disease in San Francisco have always faced a particular kind of restaurant math: eat Italian, feel terrible, or skip it entirely. A new spot in the Richmond just changed that equation.

Clementina opened on Clement Street as the city’s first fully gluten-free, celiac-safe Italian restaurant. Not gluten-reduced. Not “we have a gluten-free option.” Entirely, kitchen-wide celiac safe. The restaurant sits at 343 Clement Street, in the space that previously housed Bettola, a casual concept from the same ownership group.

The team behind it: restaurateurs Gianluca Legrottaglie and Viviana Devoto, who opened Montesacro Pinseria in SoMa more than a decade ago, along with chef Giorgio Brunella. This isn’t a pivot born from market research. It’s personal. Legrottaglie and Devoto discovered their daughter had celiac disease, and the diagnosis sent them down a different culinary path. They launched a pop-up at the former Marina location of Montesacro called Alice, named after their daughter, to test a fully gluten-free Italian menu. Brunella signed on with his own stakes in the concept: he has two daughters with celiac as well. The Marina location of Montesacro has since closed, and the Clement Street space is now the full realization of what Alice started.

The menu doesn’t read like a list of substitutions. It reads like Italian food.

Tagliatelle gets made with chickpea and brown rice flours, giving it a familiar elasticity that pasta skeptics wouldn’t clock as different. It comes braised with wine and tomato calamari. A pesto lasagna arrives in careful layers with enough cheese and bechamel to feel indulgent but not heavy. Saffron risotto, dressed with bone marrow, is on the menu too. Risotto was never a gluten problem to begin with, but here it signals something: no dish was chosen because it was easy to make safe. The kitchen wanted the whole catalog.

Pizza is on the menu, and the crust gets its crispness from rice flour, a technique that’s not far from what Montesacro uses in its signature pinsas. You can order a simple Margherita, a red pie with anchovies and capers named Alice, or the Clementina pie loaded with broccolini, Calabrian chili, and pork sausage. All of them arrive with crusts that actually crunch.

Starters include butter-poached asparagus with buffalo mozzarella, vitello tonnato (thinly sliced beef with tuna sauce, a classic that often gets overlooked on American Italian menus), and baked mussels with gorgonzola. That last one sounds like a dare, but by most accounts it works. There’s also gluten-free focaccia and baguette slices from Mariposa Bakery for mopping up sauces.

The Richmond was a smart landing spot. Clement Street functions as one of the neighborhood’s main commercial arteries, dense with restaurants and foot traffic from both the Inner and Outer Richmond. It’s a family-heavy stretch, and Clementina seems built for families, specifically the ones who’ve spent years doing the mental gymnastics of figuring out which restaurants are actually safe versus which ones just claim to be.

That distinction matters enormously to people with celiac, a condition where even trace cross-contamination can cause serious harm. A restaurant that’s merely “gluten-friendly” isn’t the same thing. Clementina is engineered around total elimination, not accommodation.

As SFist first reported on the opening, the concept grew directly out of the Alice pop-up, turning what started as a personal project into a permanent dining room.

Clementina is open for lunch Friday through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Dinner runs Wednesday through Sunday, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., and until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Reservations are available through OpenTable.