El Presidente

I came really close to not saying anything about this, but pizza...

Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports was in the area this week doing his pizza reviews at a handful of local places.

As someone not into sports, all I know about Barstool is the bad stuff that looks to be pretty well documented...sexism, anti LGBTQ, harassment. This is a quote from a 2017 Sports Illustrated article by Richard Deitsch and Chris Chavez on ESPN cancelling its partnership with Barstool after 1 episode:

At a certain point over the last week, Skipper became more aware of the historical content of Barstool Sports away from the popular Pardon My Take podcast, and specifically, the ugly comments made by Barstool founder and president Dave Portnoy in 2014 about ESPN Sunday NFL Countdown host Sam Ponder.

I will mention that during the pandemic, Barstool did good work helping out restaurants, but let's just say Dave Portnoy is not in the running to replace Alex Trebek either.

A good way to gauge if a reviewer's tastes are in line with your own is to compare their notes to yours on a visit to the same place. The first Barstool pizza review I saw was for Mama's Too! in New York City. It was the 300th review and Portnoy did it wearing a "Jew Crew" t-shirt. He was unimpressed and gave it a score of 6.8. This review went up in February of 2018. Mama's Too! was one of the places I visited on a pizza tour with some people from the pizza forum. The place stole the day. It was amazing.  It looks like Dave Portnoy and I do not have the same tastes in pizza. Turns out I wasn't the only one impressed by Mama's Too! because in November of 2018, Mama's Too! was given a star by Pete Wells in the New York Times.

From the Time's review:

It is as if Frank Tuttolomondo, the owner and pie architect of this informal but very serious pizzeria on the Upper West Side, has learned how to genetically modify pizza.

From the bits of the local reviews I watched, Portnoy burnt the hell out of his mouth on a slice early in this pizza tour so who knows if he could actually taste anything and each place I saw scored higher than Mama's Too! including one that is pretty close to my house. Trust me, if there was pizza as good as Mama's Too! close to my house, I'd be there regularly.

On top of all the problematic behavior, I don't think Portnoy's pizza reviews are that good either. His highest score locally (DeFazio's in Troy, not close to the house) would also be one of my higher scores locally, but overall, I think the Barstool pizza ratings are more a reflection of Portnoy's current mood as he hams it up for a camera than a real pizza ranking.