Dave Portnoy and the Owner of Dragon Pizza Got Into a Fairly Extreme Fight

Although Dave Portnoy is known first and foremost as the guy behind Barstool Sports, he's also become a fairly prolific reviewer of pizza in more recent years. Since he moved to New York City in 2017, he's posted daily reviews of various pizza places around the city, traveling to those places to get their pizza.

These videos have been so successful that Dave has even parlayed them into a successful frozen pizza brand. Most recently, though, Dave's pizza reviews were garnering attention because of a video that went more than a little bit haywire.

In a recently posted video in which Dave was attempting to review the pizza at Dragon Pizza in Somerville, Mass., things got fairly heated. In his review, Dave rated the pizza at just a 6.4, saying that he wasn't a fan of the way the pizza flopped, and also didn't like how parmesan-forward its flavor was. After he gave this rating, the owner of Dragon Pizza came over to give Dave a piece of his mind.

The owner said that he doesn't appreciate what Dave does to small businesses by judging them off of such a small sample size of pizza. From there, he admitted that he knew who Dave was, and that he didn't much care for his reputation after reading about him in The New York Times. Dave then chose to handle the situation with his usual maturity, mocking the owner for wearing a small t-shirt and shooting back a couple of other insults.

Things escalated from there, with the owner threatening to call the police on Dave. The whole thing is over in just a few minutes, and also features Dave's interactions with a couple of other people on the street who recognize him and take his side in the argument.

Following the initial video, Dave Portnoy discussed the altercation with Tucker Carlson on Twitter, further fanning the flames around the controversy. Now that Dave has decided to make a fairly major deal out of it, though, Dragon Pizza is getting plenty of negative attention from Dave's many fans, who are making negative comments on their social media channels and also dropping negative reviews.

The review bombing has gotten so extreme that Yelp has even issued a warning about the new reviews on its site.

"This business recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news. While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident, we’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate," Yelp's alert reads.

Clearly, then, the confrontation had a fairly negative effect on Dragon Pizza's business, at least in the short term. It seems unlikely to have the same sort of negative effect on Dave, who faces these kinds of controversies seemingly once a day.