Sauce, a New York pizzeria with three locations around New York City, has one of those elevated, artisanal, urbane aesthetics. The interior of the East Village spot is all reclaimed wood and chipped red brick, while the Lower East Side full-service joint is festooned with chandeliers and carved marble. A neon sign reading “New York” in cursive script blinks on the wall as the pizzaiolos behind the oven serve a sharp, stripped-down menu of refined Italian-American classics.
Matthew Silva, Sauce’s chief of staff, expected a clientele of families and neighborhood regulars when he opened up shop in 2018—Sauce was to be a New York joint for New Yorkers. But only one week after the debut, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy materialized in the dining room unannounced, ready to offer the pizza restaurant one of his short, brusque reviews. Sauce earned Portnoy’s exceptionally rare acclaim. He compared it favorably with the legendary downtown pizza institution John’s of Bleecker Street, landing on a monster 9.1 out of 10. For better or worse, the restaurant has never been the same.
“He literally just wandered in at 12:30 in the afternoon,” Silva told me. “We had no idea he was coming. We were hosting interviews the same day he came in—that’s how new we were. The impact was completely insane.”
The next day, Sauce had a bustling line outside. The restaurant had to close early at 3 p.m. because it ran out of dough. It’s now been five years since Portnoy’s visit, and a flood of customers is still treating his review like gospel.
Dave Portnoy is many things: a blogger, a podcaster, a media mogul, and the boorish entertainment personality at the helm of Barstool Sports. But over the past decade—and particularly the past five years—he’s also become easily the most influential pizza critic in the country. The hundreds of videos plastered across his social channels (2.9 million followers on Twitter, an additional 4 million on Instagram) follow the exact same format: Portnoy stands outside a pizza restaurant somewhere in the country with a piping hot, no-toppings cheese pie in hand, and submits a highly specific grade between 0 and 10. The “One Bite Pizza Reviews,” as they’re known, are notoriously stringent. After over 1,000 reviews, only 22 pizzerias have managed to score a 9.0 or above, and most pizzas struggle to breach the 7.0 threshold. (A 6.5 is considered respectable.) Thus, if you end up in the celestial 9s—or even land a solid 8—your restaurant immediately goes viral, becoming a can’t-miss attraction for legions of young, loud, and often inebriated Barstool die-hards.
“We would never have expected to be such a hot spot for bros,” Silva said. “Obviously we want people to buy our pizza, but they are definitely from the culture of the people who watch his videos. It’s all guys from Long Island and New Jersey flying into the store who want to eat the pizza because Portnoy said it was good.” These customers are often out all night, partying “in Murray Hill at some college bar,” so Sauce now stays open until 4 a.m. to receive them.
“We’ve adapted,” added Silva, with the slightest tinge of exasperation in his voice. “It’s like, OK, this is our brand.”
It’s hard to articulate the precise lane Portnoy occupies in American culture. On the most basic level, he’s the centrifugal force behind the rise of the aforementioned Barstool Sports, the churlish sports-media enterprise that caters primarily to fifth-year-senior frat guys and divorced personal injury attorneys. (One of Barstool’s most enduring content gimmicks is entitled “Smokeshow of the Day,” a segment in which the company highlights a bikini-clad coed.) Barstool has become ludicrously popular, brokering casino partnerships and celebrity endorsements, and Portnoy—with his coarse, drive time–esque banter and marble-mouthed Massachusetts accent—is the brightest star of the show. Alongside his pizza reviews, Portnoy frequently guests on podcasts and livestreams, where he showcases a content portfolio expertly attuned to the precepts of tri-state bro taste—sports gambling, day trading, and, of course, the New England Patriots. The best analogue I can come up with is the early-2000s incarnation of Jimmy Kimmel, back when he was hosting The Man Show.
But there are other elements of Portnoy’s character. Over the course of Trump’s presidency, Portnoy—and the rest of the Barstool brand—has drifted steadily toward the MAGA right, with the man in charge enshrining himself as a recurring talking head on nightly Fox News entertainment programming. (Portnoy frequented the dearly departed Tucker Carlson Tonight, and he was invited by the Trump White House to interview the president himself during his reelection campaign.) The American punditry even coined a new demographic shorthand, the “Barstool conservative,” to define the sect of young men in Portnoy’s flock—in general, dudes you knew from back home that are hugely concerned about “wokeness” and tend to have a dartboard mounted in their garage. This neatly corresponds with Portnoy’s many other indiscretions—in 2010 he joked that women in skinny jeans deserve to be raped; in 2016 he used the N-word in a Barstool video; and most flagrantly, in a 2021 Business Insider investigation, a number of women alleged that they’d been subjected to “violent and humiliating” sexual encounters with him. (Portnoy, who denied many of the allegations, responded by suing Business Insider. The case was tossed by a federal judge. He declined to comment to me too, saying, “Every article like this will then also talk about all the bullshit lies people have said about me so I don’t partake in these articles.”)
All of this is to say that Portnoy is not exactly a textbook arbiter of the august craft of food criticism. And yet, the One Bite Reviews are so influential that pizzaiolos across the country are duty bound to treat him like royalty. A good review can be genuinely transformative—a dinky little pizzeria in Meriden, Connecticut, also ran out of dough after Portnoy pulled through, and DeLucia’s Brick Oven Pizza in Raritan, New Jersey, burned through its entire stock of menu items after Portnoy offered it a 9.4.* Portnoy has even gone so far as to launch the One Bite app, in which Stoolies can submit their own erudite ratings for pizzas across the country—like an insulated, bros-only Yelp. In other words, if Portnoy is in your dining room, then a stampede of Sperry-donned bros will soon follow, keeping the coffers full for years to come. Every chef is aware of the stakes.
“If I’m in the middle of a meal and I hear Portnoy is at the restaurant, I’m dropping everything and heading over,” said James Shields, the owner of Brunetti Pizza in the West Village. “There are only a few three-alarm fires in the restaurant business: The fire department is here. The health department is here. Or Dave Portnoy is here.”
Brunetti earned a more-impressive-than-it-looks 8.2. Shields has just opened another new slice shop that is currently pending a Portnoy drop-in, and he’s vigilantly awaiting the moment of truth. You can understand his anxiety: Everyone in the pizza industry has seen how a One Bite Review can go horribly wrong. With Portnoy’s mercurial disposition and hair-trigger temper, it’s no surprise that he can brandish a bad score like a weapon of vengeance.
The most infamous example of Portnoy’s wrath occurred in Lexington, Kentucky, back in 2018, when he dropped by the Goodfellas Pizzeria Distillery, a modest Italian chain in the mid-South. Before Portnoy bit into the pie, a bouncer at the restaurant, who clearly didn’t know who Portnoy was, told him he couldn’t film on the company’s property and booted him to the parking lot. Portnoy retorted by issuing a scathing 0.0, telling the hapless employee—forebodingly—that he had just made a huge mistake. Like clockwork, the Goodfellas Yelp page was swarmed with aggrieved Barstool fans after the review was published, lowering its rating to a 1.5, and the restaurant swiftly attempted to mend fences. “We dropped the ball. All we can do is own it, correct ourselves and learn from our mistakes,” read a flagellating apology posted to its Facebook page. (Goodfellas declined my interview request, saying that it was a subject that they’d “much prefer to leave in the past.”)
Few restaurants can match the incredible tragedy of Goodfellas, but it’s true that a Portnoy pan—like a 1.8 offered to College Pizza near the Penn State campus—can make headlines. It’s a balancing act for your local pizza shop: Yes, everyone who has ever worked a brick oven trusts that they can render a quality pie, but there are so many other, uncontrollable factors of a Portnoy visit that keep chefs awake at night. What if the staff fails to properly kiss his ring? What if they besmirch his ego? What if he’s just in a bad mood?
“This business is hard enough as it is,” said Sam Amico, owner of DeLorenzo’s Tomato Pies in New Jersey, who received a 9.2 from Portnoy. “If you’re a startup and someone with that much impact gives you a shitty rating because your employee didn’t hit it off with him or said something negative to him, that’s actually scary. There’s no doubt about that.”
Amico was at a Billy Joel concert when Portnoy came by his store, which meant he couldn’t monitor every facet of the large cheese pizza Portnoy ordered. It didn’t matter. Portnoy was impressed with DeLorenzo’s charred crust, and the score was scintillating. Sure enough, just like Sauce, the restaurant was rewarded with a brand-new customer base. “The Stoolies would start coming in—six college kids on a trip from wherever—and they’d order a large pie well done,” continued Amico. “Whenever a bunch of college kids show up, you know where they heard about us.”
When I asked him if he had any qualms about being associated with Portnoy’s brand, given his laundry list of controversies, Amico demurred. Portnoy was a straight shooter, he told me, and like so many other icons of oafish maleness, that tends to be his core appeal.
“I’m a huge Mets fan, and I hated [New York sports radio host] Mike Francesa, but I still listened to him even though I disagreed with him,” Amico told me. “I can’t say anything bad about Dave, because he did us right.”
Silva, on the other hand, isn’t quite ready to give Portnoy his flowers. He reiterated to me over and over again that he’s not a bro—not in the slightest—which puts him at odds with the young men who have conquered his Portnoy-approved pizzeria. Does that mean Silva has any qualms about his restaurant being a pilgrimage site within the greater Barstool universe? To be forever enshrined on the One Bite map? Let me tell you, it’s complicated.
“Portnoy’s fans are still loyal to him despite all the crazy stuff he’s said and done,” Silva said. “He’s definitely behaved in certain ways where I’m like, That’s not cool, and there are personal things about him that are super shitty. But for the business, it’s been a good thing. We met him for 10 minutes and haven’t had any further interactions with the guy. He shows up, eats your pizza, and you never see him again, but his whole brand sticks with you for much longer.”
It’s Portnoy’s devil’s bargain: A 9.1 can change your life, even if the Stoolies follow you to your grave.
Correction, July 24, 2023: This article originally misstated that DeLucia’s Brick Oven Pizza is located in Rattan, New Jersey. The restaurant is in Raritan, New Jersey.
