By Tracy Morin
A visit from Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports is considered a dream come true for most pizzeria owners. And if his visit is accompanied by a stellar review, it can feel like hitting the lottery. But pizzerias have learned that his magic touch can create challenges, too.
For Bucky’s Pizza in Chatham, New Jersey, and owner Domenick Calise, Portnoy’s visit and rave review were indeed a massive blessing that also required a retooling of operations. The pizzeria, opened in October 2024, was already a smash hit—it topped $1 million in sales its first year—so it was used to being slammed with customers clamoring for a pie. But Portnoy’s visit in June escalated those crowds from weekend-night rushes to everyday mobs.
On the heels of his impressive 8.5 score, Calise recently chatted with PMQ about the reality of a Portnoy visit and its aftermath—and how that One Bite review may force an expansion soon in Bucky’s future.
Related: A Meeting of Giants (Almost): How Tony Gemignani Cracked the Dave Portnoy Code
PMQ: For those who don’t know your history, tell us about the origins of Bucky’s.
Domenick Calise: Our business started about three years ago, when I got laid off from my job in corporate America and I decided to never go back. It was two weeks before my daughter was born. And when that happened, I had this brilliant idea to foolishly sell pizza in a parking lot.
So I cashed in my severance, borrowed a couple of dollars from a family member of mine, bought a pizza oven and a trailer, and hit the road. We went to breweries, coffee shops—really anybody that would let me set up in their parking lot. I wasn’t too picky. And, slowly, momentum built.
About two years back, we signed a lease and took a couple of months; I built the restaurant and pretty much renovated the whole thing myself. We repainted and changed the floor. I had to rebuild the walk-in box, because that was in very rough shape. And we opened on Halloween of 2024. We’ve been busy all along—I’ve been very fortunate.
PMQ: Fast-forwarding to June 2026, how did the Dave Portnoy visit happen?
Calise: I was always kind of scared that Dave Portnoy would come to town, because I don’t think the style of pizza that we make is traditionally what he prefers. I know he really likes tavern-style and bar-style pizza that is really thin and crispy.
But we do sourdough, and it’s a three-day dough process. I don’t like to hide our dough; I kind of want it to be the star of the show, so our crust is probably a little more bready than he typically tends to like.
So I was afraid that he would come, and that day I left the restaurant to go get something at Home Depot for the pizzeria. But then I received a tip that he was in the area, so I just turned around. I was like, “I don’t think he’s coming, but just in case…”
I was in the pizzeria probably like five or 10 minutes, max, and I was trying to figure out where he was in New Jersey to get a sense of whether that was even anywhere close to where I was. Before we knew it, the name Austin Jenkins popped up, and that’s the name I’ve always known to look for—it’s his cameraman. My general manager saw it pop up, and he was just like, “Dom, I think you’re going to want to make this one.” The whole experience was surreal.
PMQ: What was his visit to your pizzeria like?
Calise: He’s super friendly—he has a lot of care, I think, for the people that are making pizza every day. And, quite frankly, what he does for the pizza industry—politics aside, because I know that’s a hot-button issue—you really can’t ignore how much he helps businesses.
And we felt it. We were fortunate to be busy before he even came, but our sales are up 180% from this time last year. And we sell a lot of pizza. It’s crazy. We’re doing like 400-plus pizzas every single day. Nonstop.
PMQ: Has that affected the customer experience for your previous regulars? Have you had to change your operations to handle that volume?
Calise: Yeah, and we’re very much looking ahead at how we’re going to solve that problem. Obviously, with the increase in demand, we would do those numbers on Friday and Saturday, but when it becomes every single day, it’s hard.
We used to prep during the week between 12 and 4. It wasn’t not busy; it was steady, but it was manageable. So we could ball the dough during that time. We could prepare all of our kitchen stuff.
We like to make everything from scratch, whatever we can. So there is a lot of stuff that we’re doing, whether it’s making our salad dressings, making the sausage that we put on the pizzas, meatballs—all of that stuff we do in the pizza oven.
Now we’ve had to completely retool our days. We’ve had to work out staff schedules to get people in earlier in the day and pretty much create another shift early to make sure that all of those tasks for the kitchen are getting done before the pizza starts getting made.
We’re looking into plans for expansion, whether it’s another restaurant [or more space], hopefully within the next 12 months or so. We have a dining room in the back of our current space that is very likely to become production space. We’ll move all of our dough mixing and handling to the back so we can increase our refrigeration capacity.
That’s our biggest struggle right now. We have a walk-in box that’s like 8’ by 7’. We can only fit 500 New York dough balls in there, and we can fit 500 Detroit dough balls. So we need to rectify that if we want to continue to keep up with demand.
But our customers have been really understanding and forgiving, and we’re really grateful for them to support us. They’ve been very patient, but for anybody who’s a regular and comes often, we let them know: If you guys have any issues getting pizza, please reach out to us, and we will ensure that you get pizza. Because they’re the people that got us here to begin with. For me to alienate them to serve all the people that are coming in just feels wrong.
So it’s been a really delicate balance, trying to reserve a certain amount of pizza just for regulars. We’ve had people drive as far as Virginia, I think possibly even further, to come and eat pizza just because of the review. The last thing that you want to happen is for that person to take that long of a trip to find out that we don’t have pizza.
Then there are the new customers that can’t possibly understand how we run out of pizza, but with a sourdough process, it takes three days to make our dough. It’s all cold fermented. So if you don’t have the refrigeration space, you can only do so much.
And even if we had more fridge space, then we have an oven space concern, because we would need more oven decks, and then I’d have to upgrade our electricity to support new electric deck ovens. So, yeah, the last three years have been a pretty wild ride here!
PMQ: You mentioned that you offer a couple of different pizza styles. Which style(s) did Dave Portnoy try?
Calise: We do a New York round style, a Detroit style, and we also have a grandma. But we don’t sell too many of the grandmas now, because we use our older New York dough to make them, and we have no old New York dough left over anymore.
Dave’s main review was for our New York style, the round pizza. And then I also threw in a Detroit.
PMQ: Did he give you any feedback while he was there, or did you have to wait until the review came out?
Calise: We got an 8.5, which was the highest score that he’s given out in over a year. There were two people eating outside that overheard it. They said, “I think he gave it an 8.5, maybe an 8.6,” because in the review, he’s like, “This is an 8.5, but could it be 8.6, 8.7? Like, what’s the real difference?”
So we didn’t really know, and I know that he doesn’t love when people ask. So I decided not to ask. And then we just had anxiety for a week and a half until the review dropped, and it was a very high score.
PMQ: Did you know how long you’d have to wait for that review to be posted?
Calise: It depends where you’re at in the queue and what videos need to go on before you. I didn’t sleep for the entire week and a half. And I realized that every pizza review gets posted between Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. on the dot.
So there was a Monday when we were sitting there like, “It might be today, it might be today,” and then he didn’t post any review that day. And then the next day you’re waiting and you’re like, “It might be us. It might be us.” And then it was someone else.
I knew that as soon as the review dropped, we were instantly going to be busy. And I was trying to get ahead of it as much as you can, but a week and a half isn’t that much time.
PMQ: Everyone wants the attention and the publicity of a Portnoy review, but your experience shows the reality—you have to be equipped to handle that kind of demand. What has your aftermath been like at the pizzeria?
Calise: We’re fortunate to have had busy days and busy rushes, and I feel like we were kind of prepared for it without being prepared. Many nights, we’ve done 450-plus pizzas. So we have systems in place.
For us, it was really just trying to manage the chaos of preparing everything. The queue just keeps building, and once we open, [employees] are making pizza until we go home.
We do no delivery; everything is takeout or dine-in. Dine-in has been tough because we do pre-orders, so you can order online in advance. But what starts happening is, we’re selling out of pizza before the dine-in rush comes.
So that was a hard one for the first two weeks, because we would open for the day and sell out within an hour of opening. Obviously, you have pizzas to make all day long, but once dinnertime started coming and people were walking in to buy pizza, there wasn’t any left.
We’ve gotten a better handle on that now. We’ve adjusted, and we don’t put all of our stock up for online ordering. We hold some back so we have pizza to feed people that come in. But even then, I think demand exceeds what we’re capable of producing.
We have a very long L-shaped, narrow counter and the oven space situation. So you can’t really fit more people behind the counter, and if you’re going to start throwing more pizzas in the oven, you need more hands to process those pizzas. I think 500 is our max, which is still an outrageous number.
Right now, customers won’t be able to place online orders once we’re sold out there. And then once we’re out out [for dine-in customers], a sign goes on the door. That’s the best we can do.
PMQ: How has the feedback been from people coming in, especially those traveling from far away or who heard about you through Dave Portnoy?
Calise: The response has been incredible. One customer drove all the way from Virginia and made it clear as soon as he walked in that he was there specifically to try the pizza Dave Portnoy had just reviewed. He told everyone in the restaurant why he was there, and we’ve heard similar stories from other customers. It’s been amazing to see people making the trip just to experience what we’ve built.
Beyond the increased traffic, it’s also been incredibly validating. I taught myself how to make pizza—I never worked in a pizzeria a day in my life. When COVID hit, making pizzeria-quality pizza at home became my hobby. Like a lot of people, I got into sourdough baking and eventually wondered, “Why am I not making sourdough pizza?”
I still deal with imposter syndrome, because there are people who’ve spent 25 or 30 years perfecting their craft. We make a very unique product with high-hydration dough and a lot of artisan techniques, and while I always believed it was good, hearing customers consistently praise it—and then having someone like Dave Portnoy, who’s probably eaten more pizza than just about anyone, give us such a high score—is incredibly meaningful.
The last three years have been a roller coaster. We ran out of money, sold our house and went through a lot to keep this dream alive. Looking back on everything we’ve been through and seeing where we are now, it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s hard to believe we made it to the other side.
PMQ: Do you have any advice to share with other pizzerias about working with Dave Portnoy, or advice for getting on his radar?
Calise: The only advice I can really share comes from Dave himself. He has said that if you consistently tag him on social media, eventually he’ll notice. A lot of pizzerias have done campaigns, saying things like, “Making a pizza every day until Dave Portnoy comes to review it,” and, according to him, that’s one way to get his attention over time.
We didn’t do that ourselves, but that’s the advice he’s given publicly. At the end of the day, he’s obviously a very busy guy, so there’s no guarantee—but persistence seems to help.
Tracy Morin is PMQ’s associate editor.
