The popular One Bite social series by Dave Portnoy, President of Barstool Sports, hit the streets of Toronto, in search of the best pizza in the city. We caught up with Stool Presidente himself to discuss his time here in Toronto.
Portnoy is the Founder and President of Barstool Sports—a sports & pop culture media company, which covers the latest news and viral highlights with blogs, videos and podcasts. The company launched in the early 2000s and has amassed quite the following. Portnoy himself has grown into a media personality, hosting a variety of Barstool’s programs and has a reputation for discussing controversial topics and expressing his opinions in a no-holds way.
His programs include BFFs Pod, The Dave Portnoy Show, and One Bite Pizza Reviews. which according to Portnoy in a Raz Report podcast, is “probably the number one thing people know me by.”
As revealed in the podcast, the series began after a debate with his coworker Dan Katz [also known as “Big Cat”]. The debate: which food would someone eat if they could eat only one for the rest of their lives.
Portnoy decided to put his money where his mouth was and prove that pizza was the superior option. For the following month, he went on a mission trialing different pizza spots. While he was making his rounds, he figured he might as well bite it and review it—not realizing how quickly the concept would catch on.
Now, Portnoy has reviewed over 400 pizzas—and 19 of them are here in Toronto!
Overall, Portnoy is quite impressed with the pizza scene here in the city, rating 5 places a score over 8. In his books, anything above an 8 is an extremely high score.
His favourite: North of Brooklyn.
Portnoy explains that the series does a lot to promote local and small businesses. He notes that North of Brooklyn sold out of pizza after the review was posted.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he’s spoken out about the lack of government support small businesses have received. This was something that never sat right with him. He quotes these businesses as being the backbone of the United States, leading him and Barstool Sports to launch The Barstool Fund.
This fund helped pay the rent and/or other bills of small businesses around America that applied for support online. One of the prerequisites for consideration is that the business would have to be paying their employees’ payroll.
The fund has since raised over $40million dollars in aid for these companies.
We discuss all this and more in the interview below: