Watch: BTS Peek At How Ceres Makes Their 9.2 Score Pizza & Barstool HQ Tries One Bite Of A Pie (Spoiler Alert Dave Portnoy Was CORRECT)

Devlin5/18/2025 6:30 PM

Unless you've been living under an internet rock, you likely already know about the One Bite Score heard round the world. If not you can catch up below but the gist is, Dave Portnoy just dropped his first 9+ score since 2023.

Which adds IMMEDIATE hall-of-fame potential to a pizza.

With the Viva La Food team (me) already here in the heart of Manhattan, I figured it might be fun to go see the Portnoy Effect live in the flesh. So I went down to Ceres 1 day after Dave's review dropped to get in line at 12pm with common man. Put my name in for a 3pm pickup and got my 15k steps in with some pigeons to pass the time.

I've had worse days near Little Italy. Look at this fucking majestic pie!

A lot of people may scoff at waiting 3 hours just for a lil ol' pizza pie, but clearly they don't believe in Dave Portnoy the way I do. He's the most honest man I know and out of every skill he has, which is all of them, his pizza palate might be the #1.

If that guy even goes above an 8 for a One Bite Score, it's already in must-try territory. But when it's over 9000? Bah GAWD that slice is guaranteed to be beyond a culinary delight. The kind of bite where you close your eyes, start chewing slower, and wonder…

…Is this moment of food bliss better than sex?

THE PORTNOY EFFECT. And also exactly what it felt like trying their Nduja slice.

And I gotta give a shout out to the 2 chefs, Jake & Julien, for the privilege of watching them work. They're the only 2 dudes in there and they're doing EVERYTHING. Running the register, rotating pies every 30 seconds, smoothing out tomato sauce for 30 rotations, sprinkling da mozzarella, they were actual mad scientists in that bitch. Otherworldly precision. Was pretty damn cool to see the exact process that creates a pie with such a next level taste, turns out being meticulous as fuck can pay off sometimes.

Clearly most of the internet agreed, because Viva La Food's peek behind the curtain ended up in the Top 3 of Barstool's most viewed original content this week. Only guys getting more #pageviews were Dave Portnoy, The Patriots, & The Lisan al Gaib. Honored to be sprinkled amongst those legends. And definitely is pretty wild to see our VFL Vlog nearly double up the original pizza review too.

Thank YOU for the opportunity to follow your lead Dave Portnoy! I love you.

And you're tall as fuck brother! Look at the perfect surfer hair! Wow!

It's been a fun start to the Viva La Food era and we're cooking up more ways to crossover & collab with all our food creators more often. I know Large & Rone are already in the lab for that and there's some more cooking competitions coming soon too.

Give us a follow and let us know where you'd like to see Barstool HQ eat next. NYC or otherwise… We do it for YOU, the common man & woman. The real eaters.