Photo via stoolpresidente/Facebook
Dave Portnoy outside Delosa's Pizza in John's Pass, Florida.
Over the last week, Bay area pizza shops shared video and photos of Dave Portnoy, the controversial founder of Barstool Sports, popping in to grab food, and posting his taste tests, as part of his ongoing “One Bite Pizza Reviews.”
In the reviews, Portnoy—who founded his blog, which is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in 2003—takes one bite (actually several bites) of a plain cheese pizza and rates it on a sale of 0-10, decimal points and all.
In 2019, he gave downtown Tampa’s Eddie & Sam’s a 7.1 in a review that’s been viewed more than 216,000 times.
Stops on Portnoy’s 2024 agenda included a handful of Sarasota pizza spots that’ve already received scores: Venezia Italian Restaurant (6.7), Il Panificio (7.4) and Rico’s (7.2).
“Il Panificio,” that’s my favorite in the area,” he added.
Portnoy also visited more than a dozen Tampa Bay pizza spots including:
- Brooklyn Pizza Company
- Cristino's Coal Oven Pizza
- Delosa’s Pizza
- DiGiorgio’s Pizzeria
- Forbici
- Joey Brooklyn’s
- The Nona Slice House
- Madison Avenue Pizza
- Marina’s Pizza & Pasta
- Lee’s Grocery
- Pipers Scratch Pizza Shop
- Sally O'Neal's Pizza Hotline
- Toby’s Little Italy Pizza
- The Violet Stone
Travis Kaiser, founder and owner of Santoro’s, told CL that having Portnoy pop in is something that’s probably on the minds of any independent pizza shop owner. “Then he's in your parking lot. That's a pretty cool thing. You know?,” Kaiser, who opened the popular shop in 2021, added.
Santoro's, located at 1329 W Cass St. in Tampa, captured their review on the shop's own social media page, but bleeped out the score.
“I want to let him do it,” Kaiser added, declining to share what score Portnoy gave his Best of the Bay-winning business. “It's all over the internet right now, but I don't want it to come out of my mouth. I think he gave us a fair score. But I think the review itself was really good.”
Sean Ferraro, the man who delivers pizzas by boat for Dunedin’s Madison Avenue Pizza, said he doesn’t know his shop’s score, but thinks it’s in the high-sevens.
Ferraro, who was baking bread for Madison Avenue’s sandwiches the morning after Portnoy's visit, told CL that the whole experience was nerve wracking, especially as friends and family started to blow up his phone while they tracked Portnoy’s movements across Pinellas County.
“Once he got to Clearwater, things kind of got real and I was like, ‘Oh, man, he's at Cristino's, and that's like 20 minutes from here,” Ferraro said, adding that he told his staff to be on the lookout for a large cheese to-go order.
“And sure enough, 30 minutes after he was at Cristino's, we got a large cheese pizza ticket from a call-in order. We looked at the history and we're like, “Well, this guy never ordered from us before, it fits the profile, it's an out of state number,” he said. “So we treated it as if it was him, and sure enough he walked through the door like 15 minutes later.”
With 1.24 million subscribers on YouTube alone, a visit from “One Bite Pizza Reviews,” is a boost for any small local business. Portnoy knows that, and even raised more than $41 million for similar businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Pizza wasn’t the only thing Portnoy—loathed and loved in part for his moronic personality, anti-union rhetoric, and sexual assault allegations (which he’s denied)—blathered on about either.
In a video posted to Twitter (now known as X) the 46-year-old also ripped on his room at the Tampa Edition, ranting about his room, which he said he paid $5,000 a night for.
The proud University of Michigan alum said that he should receive fellatio at that rate, adding that he expects to also have an infinity pool overlooking the water and a masseuse. “This is an average suite,” who's interviewed Donald Trump and also criticized the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, complained.
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