On Dave Portnoy’s complaint against the Trump Administration

Plain pizza from Bazbeaux, a restaurant with locations in Carmel and Indianapolis, Indiana

I consider Barstool Sports’ One Bite pizza reviews a guilty pleasure, not that I’ve ever hid my addiction to these short YouTube videos from my friends and family. One Bite is an internal publication of Barstool Sports, which is the politically incorrect answer to 538, the polling aggregation website, which used to cover sports.

Portnoy founded Barstool in Boston, Massachusetts and it struggled at first, until he got the idea of publishing pictures of women in bikinis on the front covers.  In 2007 he expanded to a blog format. Since then, his ever-expanding online media company has become a mainstay of bro culture. 

His politics are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. He voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016 and interviewed him at the White House in July, 2020.  After Trump’s re-election in 2024, he went on a three-minute YouTube rant, titled “My Kneejerk Reaction to Trump’s victory” saying that Kamala Harris lost because of the Democrats’ arrogance and moral superiority.  

But Portnoy, as far as I can tell, is not necessarily MAGA.

He made news this week by commenting on the Signal scandal—when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth exposed American war plans against the Houthis in Yemen on a Signal chat to various agency heads. Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was in on this group chat on the app, thanks to National Security Advisor Mike Walz, who had somehow added Goldberg to his group.

Portnoy called the incident a “fuckup of epic proportions.” He said, “Someone has to go down,” presumably pointing to Hegseth and/or Walz.  I was pleased that Portnoy had finally called the emperor naked, as it were, when his cohorts in conservative media are just treating this as just another day in Trumplandia. But it made no difference in my consumption of his pizza reviews.

Portnoy’s MO for said reviews is to go all around the country, around the world even, going to every pizzeria he can think of, from Little Caesars to his favorite joints in New Haven, Connecticut.  He’ll sample the pizza on the street, generally right in the storefront of the pizza place he’s reviewing. At the same time, he’ll be talking to his cameraman, pizza box in one hand, slice in the other.  

“All right” he says to Frankie, or to whomever doing the camera work now, “it’s pizza review time.” 

“One bite, everybody knows the rules,” he says. 

Except he doesn’t just take one bite. He usually inhales most of a slice, including the crust. It’s always a plain cheese pizza he reviews, although on rare occasions he might sample two different pizzas from the same joint. He judges the pizzas on a scale from 0 to 10, and it’s very rare when the pizza breaks 9.  That honor is mostly reserved for his favorite style of pizza, the New Haven style, which is coal-fired pizza with thin crust and limited use of melting cheese.  That's to be distinguished from the New York style pizza, which he also loves, but not as much as the New Haven style.

The New York Italian slice, or the Italian American slice, which doesn’t rate quite so high in Portnoy’s book, is similar in some respects to its close cousin from New Haven. A good New York slice has a balance of all ingredients, of tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, crust, and olive oil. Portnoy also prefers his pizzas well done, with lots of crisp, even char. 

He doesn’t mind artisanal touches, like sprinklings of Parmesan or Romano, but doesn’t like it when the cooks go overboard with it. He’s open about his biases. Although he appreciates other types of pizza; Chicago style, Detroit Style, margherita pizza, his scale for these types of pizzas tops off somewhere around 8.2 and 8.3.  You might expect him to give a 0.0 to a $2,000 pizza baked with flakes of gold. Yes, he’s done this.  But I’ve also seen him give a decent score to a vegan pizza, which I didn’t expect.

As for the kind of pizza I grew up on, which was mostly frozen pizza, or pizza from commercial chains like Pizza hut and Godfather’s, generally don’t rate too well on his scale. Portnoy’s been to my hometown of Indianapolis quite a bit, where he rated a pizza from Bazbeaux, a local favorite, 5.6, finding it to be messy, overly cheesy.  He’s also been to Bloomington, the home of Indiana University.  Bloomington is also the home of Mother Bear’s Pizza which did just a tad better than Bazbeaux, at 6.1.  

In August 2023, Portnoy got into it with the owner of Dragon Pizza in Somerville, Massachusetts, after calling their pizza a “floppy mess.”  They then entered into an exchange rife with four-letter words.  

Portnoy’s nom de guerre is El Presidente.  He hasn’t done a good job evading controversy over the years. In 2010 he made this comment on his blog, "...though I never condone rape if you're a size 6 and you're wearing skinny jeans you kind of deserve to be raped right?”  In 2021, a Business Insider article detailed sexual assault allegations against Portnoy, which he has steadfastly denied. 

 In considering his character, it’s worth noting he’s done a lot to help small businesses during COVID by founding The Barstool Fund.  The nonprofit, to which he committed $500,000 of his own money to get started, helped businesses survive shutdown orders caused by the pandemic.  

I don’t agree with Portnoy on much in the realm of politics, but that doesn’t stop me from watching his pizza reviews, or wondering how he stays fit swallowing all that dough, cheese, and olive oil.  

He’s also insinuated himself into my poetry. That is to say, I wrote a poem about him. In the following piece, I link him and Philip Roth, who is the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, which was written before Dave Portnoy was born.  Notice that I fail to make the distinction between New Haven style and New York pizza in the poem.  I claim poetic license on this one.  After all, it’s a distinction I never would’ve known if I hadn’t started watching his pizza reviews. I’m willing to bet that any other pizza connoisseurs have learned this distinction through watching his pizza videos.  There’s much worse ways to spend your time online.  Like, you could be replying to texts by Pete Hegseth containing his war plans.

Here’s the poem, which is part of my collection of poetry and short prose titled Mindfucking Roundabouts of Carmel, Indiana.

Portnoy’s Complaint 

Not the Philip Roth novel
where the narrator
cums on his sister’s bra 
while wanking on the toilet

but Dave Portnoy visiting
Indy to do pizza reviews
arriving outside Bazbeaux
on Mass Ave.

While taking measure
of the pie in the box
saying it’s way too heavy
he takes one bite 

that confirms his preconceptions;
“Looks like the Bermuda
triangle of cheese … “
He tells his YouTube base

to have their brain “taken out”
if they like this pie
but I want to tell him
that not all pizza needs be

 New York style.
Not all pizza needs be
in your face
like Travis Bickle.    

You can like different pizzas
your shrink will tell you:
we all have different ways
of getting off.

— Dan Grossman