Space Cats, Anchovies, and the Punk of Pizza: A Q&A with Berkeley’s State Flour Pizza

Forget North Beach (sorry, Frisco). For me, the Bay Area’s pizza capital — pie for pie, slice for slice — is Berkeley. It makes perfect sense for this city to excel in a dish that has long appealed to punk rockers, graffiti artists, skaters, and college students living on a shoestring budget and looking to fuel up on-the-go.

Berkeley has produced cult-favorite pizzerias that have, in turn, influenced pizza trends far beyond the Bay, including spots like the locally-sourced, worker-owned Cheeseboard Collective, as well as by-the-slice emporiums like Blondie’s, which opened near campus in 1980. As both a former UC Berkeley transfer student and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-raised millennial who has survived on a lifetime diet of pizzas, I’ve frequented Berkeley’s pizzerias aplenty. And I’m here to tell you that you shouldn’t skip State Flour Pizza on College Avenue.

Run by Derek Lau — a PizzaHacker alum from Silicon Valley and a formally trained chef-turned-pizzaiolo — State Flour has remained somewhat overshadowed in the pizza-laden city since opening in 2022. But Lau excels at the Californian art of keeping it fresh, creative and seasonal. (While writing this, the weekly special was an artichoke, bacon, Yukon potato, spinach, garlic confit, and charred scallion ranch on a three-cheese pie.) 

That ethos extends beyond toppings, as evidenced by collaborations with community members like Shawn Harris, the semi-retired frontman of the punk band the Matches. Now a children’s book illustrator and the co-author of the bestselling book The First Cat In Space Ate Pizza, he teamed up with Lau to design the shop’s astronaut-cat-eating-pizza merch. This October, they’re set to release a new collaborative design in the seemingly ongoing merch series (spoiler: it’s a cat eating pizza in space).

Lau and Harris hopped on a Zoom to talk about the dangers of mediocre pizza, the group ethics of sharing anchovies, and why corn pizza is the restaurant’s sleeper hit.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

If you could teleport anywhere for a slice of pizza — locally or beyond — where would you go first?

Derek Lau: That's such a loaded question for me. I'm going to go old school and say Di Fara Pizza in Brooklyn. Specifically the square slice, which is mind-blowing. When I was doing research before opening State Flour, I took a red-eye to New York City, and I went straight to the subway then waited an extra 30 minutes at the shop for a slice.

Shawn Harris: Recently I’ve been going to the movies a lot, at the Alamo in the Mission. And every time I go, I grab a slice down at Beretta on Valencia. The Italian hot oil on pizza is their signature. For me, a favorite slice is neighborhood-based. It's where you spend all your hours, because you’ve already found the best in your radius.

What defines a good pizza for you?

SH: There’s something I've been thinking about more and more. I can't say I was thinking about this when I was 20, but now that I'm a bit older, every time I have a mediocre meal, I’m like, damn, I don't have an endless supply of meals left. I wanna eat the best pizza I can. Mediocre food is just not inspiring and it's dangerous ingesting too many uninspiring things.

DL: People ask me all the time, what do I like? ‘Cause I have all these crazy pizzas on the menu here. And they're great combinations, but sometimes I just get down with a simple cheese pizza and it's the best thing ever. Cheese, margherita, pepperoni. A good slice for me is nicely fermented, light, crispy, crust isn’t dry in the middle. Balanced ingredients. Not too salty. Sauce has a good tang and acidity.

How did you two meet? A pizzamaker and an illustrator walk into a bar...

DL: Mac Barnett [a New York Times best selling author] is a regular customer of mine, and Mac and Shawn hang out and play pickleball once in a while.

SH: Hey, hey, c’mon. We play racquetball. We are not coat-tail pickleball players. But yeah, Mac is the guy who wrote The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza with me.

DL: I asked Shawn [if he could design something original for the pizzeria], because Shawn's an amazing illustrator. And then, you guys proposed to do a collaboration between the book and the pizza shop. At first I assumed that maybe the publication or copyrights wouldn't allow for the book to be on our merch. And as soon as I had it in my mind that it wasn't gonna happen, Mac showed up one day, like, “Have you seen [Shawn’s] new t-shirt design?”

Besides cool art, how has State Flour been able to create space for itself in such a dense pizza scene in Berkeley?

DL: There are similarities to what we are all doing here. But everyone has their own recipe and formula and style for the way they're going about it. In general, I'm trying to do a New York-style East Coast crust and format, but I'm also going wild with this Berkeley farm-to-table Californian approach. We also try to do culturally different pizzas: a taco pizza, or octopus pizza. It’s a chance to do something unique.

What’s a good pie to order at your shop?

SH: I'm kind of a controversial pizza dude. Honestly, my favorite is Hawaiian-style. Derek makes his with hot peppers and pineapple. We always get that. Mac's 3-year-old always forgets it's too spicy for him. Also, just anchovies on pizza. Nobody ever wants to go in on a whole anchovies pie with me, but I actually love anchovies on pizza. Derek, next time I'm around, I’ll need to get a slice of that from you.

DL: Dude, I'll do a half and half for you guys.

SH: It’s honestly just easier to go with the classic pepperoni. That’s something everyone can always agree on, and Derek makes an amazing pepperoni pizza.

DL: I think right now, the pizza that we keep going back to and that I've been putting as the weekly special, maybe almost too much, is corn. It's basically a pepperoni pizza with jalapeño, corn, and this Peruvian aji verde sauce. It's cilantro- and lime-based, and it hits on so many levels. The corn is sweet, the pepperoni is salty, the jalapeños are spicy and the aji verde just cools it all off. We make that for our staff more than any other pizza.

There’s a long history in the Bay of pizzerias that tap into different subcultures: Skaters, graffiti writers, punk rockers, hip-hop heads. Why do you think that is? 

DL: When it comes to line cooking, specifically, there's a certain subgroup of people who do that kind of work. You meet all types of artists and creative people. There's also this social aspect about pizza because when you're young and out and you're not in tech or in the professional world, and you are an artist type — you know, your funds are not really booming — a slice of pizza is an easy way to substantially fill yourself up. After a show in the Bay, it's either pizza or a burrito.

SH: I also think it's important in creative fields to have taste. Basically your only job is to have strong opinions, to be discerning. [As bookmakers], Mac and I ingest a lot of things that other people are making: literature, culture, ideas. Then we re-channel it outwards in a very narrow beam of what inspired us. Punk rock [in particular] is often defined more by what it's not than what it actually is. It's an ethos of rejecting a lot to get at what remains. With food, you obviously have to have taste as well. Derek probably eats and likes a lot of stuff, but what he puts into his pizzas is specifically tailored for his audience, the customer. 

I guess one other thing is, what food can you put backstage? Pizza can be shared at a round table, you know what I mean? Everyone grab a slice. 

State Flour Pizza (2985 College Ave., Berkeley) is open noon-3 p.m. and 5-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Shawn Harris and Mac Barnett’s ‘The First Cat in Space and the Baby Pirate’s Revenge’ publishes Nov. 4, 2025; they’ll appear Nov. 2 at Santa Cruz High School and Nov. 15 at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley — details here.