No Complaints: Portnoy Visits Tony’s Pizza Napoletana for Super Bowl Weekend
by Joe Bonadio
In what was probably the city’s most important event in years, Super Bowl crowds descended on San Francisco last weekend in record numbers. And by all reports, visitors were delighted—and surprised—at what they found. Even the New York Times had to admit that our City By The Bay is looking splendid indeed.
And as if there wasn’t enough going on, Portnoy, social media personality and pizza influencer extraordinaire, decided to stop in to Tony’s for a visit. Famous for his One Bite Pizza Reviews, Portnoy has become arguably the most influential man in pizza, with the ability to utterly transform the fate of a pizzeria with just a few words. As you can imagine, the arrival of someone like Portnoy at your restaurant is a legitimate cause for anxiety.
“Okay, so Portnoy came,” Tony recounted. “He’s from Boston, so he’s a Patriots fan. He was coming to the city for the Super Bowl, so he posted a few times asking where he should eat in the Bay Area.
“There were like 1,200 comments already, like on day one, and the majority of them were recommending Tony’s,” he told me. “Pizza guys, everyone. I saw a little bit of it, and people were messaging me: Portnoy’s in town. So I went to my team and told them: Hey, he may order a cheese pizza, plain. I want him to have one of two: either the High Five, or even better would be the tomato pie, coal oven,” the chef explained. “Make sure you cook it like I like it, because that’s how he likes it. Well done, no Romano, no basil, upside down pizza, tomato pie. Make it how I taught you guys, and don’t be in a hurry to take it out early.”
“So I got a message from a local pizzeria that he might show up. This was yesterday,” Tony says. “Now, I’m down in LA. But I briefed my team like 150 times: if he orders a cheese pizza, give this to him regardless of what he orders. I don’t care. We’ll give him what he orders, but also give him the pizza I want him to have.”
“Anyway, at this point he’s at Golden Boy, and we get a message from Sotto Mare, I think. Somebody over there messaged Oscar: He’s here. I think he’s heading over to you.
“Now, this guy has millions of followers, and he can move the needle on any restaurant, 150 percent. So he came to us, and then he went to Flour + Water. Boom, boom, boom,” Tony says. “Meanwhile, I’m heading back from a quick business trip to LA, and I’m like… great.
“Afterward, I found out that Oscar made both pizzas. I knew he was making one, I didn’t know he was making two. So they gave the tomato pie to him. You’ll probably see it come out in a review this week. He kind of opens the box and says, ‘Oh, it’s not what I ordered, but it’s what I like.’
“To get a nine is almost impossible from this guy,” Tony explains. “An eight is amazing. A seven is good, and sixes on down are like, meh. And he gives a lot of sixes and sevens, mostly sixes and sevens.
“I told Oscar that I’ll give you $1,000 cash if we get an eight or over,” Tony admits. “So we got an 8.2. Oscar made two pizzas, and he’s getting $2,000. It was for whoever makes it. I thought it was a combination of guys, but he’s like, I made both pizzas, because I wanted to make sure they were perfect. I did exactly what you told me to do.
“Originally I said, give the pizzas to him both at the same time, but I’m glad they didn’t,” Tony reflects. “I thought one person was making one, and another person another. I didn’t know Oscar was making both. So Natale decided to just give him the first one.
“And that’s the one he judged. He got the cheese, and he said it was amazing, but this is my jam, this is what I want. So it was exactly what he liked, 150 percent,” Tony stresses. “And I knew, I just knew. That’s what I like. He likes what I like, honestly. Coal fire, crispy, cooked well, pushed out perfectly, tomato upside down pizza.
“Typically he doesn’t like a lot of shaved parm, or romano or grana padano, which a lot of people do. And I’m okay with that, but I’m more about the pizza itself. So you better believe we were working on it, working on it, working on it,” Tony tells me. “So Oscar got a great number, an 8.2. Then I believe Flour + Water got a 7.1, and Golden Boy got a 7.3. Then Pink Onion, Pizza Shop and all the rest.
“There were a lot of 7.1s and 7.3s,” Tony notes. “You can look at it when it comes out, but right now we’re rated really high, I think the highest in San Francisco. So I’m happy that Oscar made it exactly how I told him to make it, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Tony’s GM Natale Cardamone echoed the pizzamaker’s sentiments. “We liked having him here,” he told me. “We know what he likes, and we were excited to make it for him at the highest level, as we do for all our customers.”
Naturally, I had to hear from the man himself. As Tony’s right-hand man in the kitchen, Oscar Venegas is a pizza champion in his own right, having earned first place in the pan pizza division at last year’s Pizza Expo. With Tony out of the kitchen, it fell on Oscar to make the perfect Portnoy pizza.
“We’ve been expecting him to come by for over a year now,” Oscar told me. “Tony has been telling us he might come to the city to review us. And Tony being Tony, he knew what the guy loved. So he trained us on that, and we knew what to expect.”
Meanwhile, the pizza critic chose to visit on Super Bowl weekend. “He came by unexpectedly, when Tony was still at the airport. So he was pretty much training me over the phone. He wants that pizza to be cooked slow, he wants it pushed out super thin. He reminded me to make sure it was rested. And I just made sure to follow every single sentence,” Oscar says. “And I’m over here panicking, freaking out, and just trying to stay cool for the rest of the staff.
“But overall, we were really happy with the score that we got,” Oscar concludes. “The pie itself came out looking phenomenal, and we’re really excited that he was here, and that he got to try two styles of our pizza.”
To see Portnoy’s One Bite Pizza Review of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, click here.
