What Bartstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy had to say about Atlanta’s pizza
Social media personality and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy returned to Atlanta this week to rate more of the city’s pizzerias as part of his popular digital pizza review series One Bite.
The concept is simple: Portnoy orders a cheese pizza and rates it based on the first few bites. Ratings are posted online and through his app, One Bite.
During his most recent Atlanta visit, he hit a swath of popular pizza restaurants, including Brainwave, Bertolozi’s, Pizza by Yandys, Lloyd’s Restaurant & Lounge, plus repeat visits to Fellini’s and Glide Pizza.
Bertolozi’s Pizzeria in Buckhead, operated by Chicago native Danny Huber, features Chicago-style tavern pizza. Portnoy gave the restaurant a 7.3 during his visit.
“(It) would fit in very well in (Chicago),” Portnoy told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview after his stop here.
After Huber moved to Atlanta and couldn’t find pizza on par with Chicago‘s, he launched Bertolozi’s as a pop-up at breweries around the city. As its popularity grew, it moved into the Roswell Junction food hall, and in December Huber opened his first standalone location.
Getting reviewed within his first month of business was certainly a surprise, but Huber has friends in Chicago whose pizzerias have been rated by Portnoy.
“They call it the Portnoy effect,” Huber said. “It’s like winning the lottery, right? It can either make you or it could break you, so you have to be ready for that and you have to understand that you gotta take the good with the bad and just muscle through it.”
After Huber realized Portnoy had visited, he prepared his team for an influx of customers. A viral social media review of a restaurant can mean crowds of hungry (and sometimes impatient) diners with high expectations.
“We’re not gonna pump out bad pizza, that’s not who we are,” he said. That means ordering from Bertolozi’s may require a wait.” We’re going to try to uphold our highest hospitality because that’s important to us, as well.”
On this visit, Portnoy also posted a review video from his trip to Pizza By Yandy’s, a New York and Detroit-style pizza shop inside Carniceria Los Pinos, a Latin American grocery store in Sandy Springs.
“I was shocked by Yandys,” Portnoy told the AJC. “That was one of the more unusual, good pizza spots that I’ve seen in a long time.”
Portnoy rated it a 7.7. The only pizza shop in Atlanta that he’s given a higher score to is Antico, which he rated an 8.3 during a 2019 visit.
On a previous trip to Atlanta, he gave New York-style shop Glide Pizza a score of 7.7.
Portnoy said he’ll add scores for the other restaurants soon, but noted he enjoyed Brainwave Pizza, a restaurant inside Inner Voice Brewing in Decatur that offers New York-style sourdough pizza.
“I thought (Brainwave) was excellent,” he said. “Like, that could have been a low eight, high seven type situation.”
Before this recent visit, Portnoy was in Atlanta in 2024, when he went to Nina & Rafi’s on the Eastside Beltline and gave it a 6.3 (though the Beltline itself earned a 10.0 from him). Nina & Rafi’s closed last year.
Since launching the series in 2013, he’s trekked across the country for pizza slices with stops in Florida, Tennessee, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, Nevada and New Jersey.
The only perfect 10 he’s given was for Monte’s Restaurant in Lynn, Massachusetts.
About the Author
Olivia Wakim is a digital content producer on the food and dining team. She joined the AJC as an intern in 2023 after graduating from the University of Georgia with a journalism degree. While in school, she reported for The Red & Black, Grady Newsource and the Marietta Daily Journal.
