Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy has made a habit out of tracking down the country’s most storied neighborhood pizzerias, and his latest stop brought him to Englewood, New Jersey, for a visit to Crispy Crust Pizza, a shop locals insist has been slinging pies for an astonishing 57 years. The review, part of Portnoy’s long-running One Bite Pizza Reviews series and presented this time by BODYARMOR, gave the Bergen County institution the kind of national attention that has become a genuine rite of passage for pizzerias across the country, one bite, one honest reaction, and a score that can send a small shop’s business into overdrive practically overnight.
Crispy Crust Pizza sits at 44 West Palisade Avenue in the heart of Englewood, a shop that has become woven so thoroughly into the fabric of the town that its own history reads like a genuine only-in-New-Jersey story. While the shop’s own materials describe more than three decades of continuous service, longtime residents place its roots even further back, closer to the 57-year mark Portnoy referenced in his visit, the kind of good-natured local dispute over exact founding dates that tends to follow any pizzeria old enough to have become a genuine neighborhood landmark rather than just another place to grab a slice.
Either way, Crispy Crust has clearly outlasted plenty of competitors in a business where staying power alone counts as its own kind of achievement.
What makes Crispy Crust’s backstory genuinely remarkable, though, has nothing to do with pizza at all. Long before Englewood locals were debating exactly how many decades the shop had been open, a young employee named Big Bank Hank spent his days in 1979 making pies behind the counter, passing the time rapping along to homemade hip-hop tapes while he worked. That same year, Hank became one third of the Sugarhill Gang, and their single “Rapper’s Delight” went on to become widely credited as the record that first popularized hip-hop on a national and international scale, effectively marking the genre’s mainstream birth. It’s a genuinely rare distinction for any pizza shop to claim a direct connection to one of the most significant records in American music history, and it gives Crispy Crust a story that extends well beyond its crust and sauce.
Portnoy’s visit followed the same format that has turned his One Bite series into a genuine cultural phenomenon over the years. Rather than a lengthy sit-down meal or an extended interview, the format sticks to its core premise, a single honest bite, an unfiltered reaction, and a numerical score that pizza shops across the country have come to both dread and hope for in equal measure. For a shop with as much local history as Crispy Crust, earning a strong score carries stakes beyond just bragging rights, since a favorable One Bite review has repeatedly proven capable of sending a modest neighborhood shop’s foot traffic soaring almost overnight, as pizza enthusiasts from well outside the immediate area make the trip specifically because Portnoy gave a place his stamp of approval.
Crispy Crust’s own menu has built a loyal local following over the years independent of any national attention, with regulars pointing specifically to the shop’s Sicilian pizza and mozzarella sticks as standout orders that keep customers coming back well beyond a first visit. That kind of established local reputation is exactly the sort of thing Portnoy’s reviews tend to either validate for a wider audience or, less often, complicate when his own reaction doesn’t fully match the hometown consensus, a tension that has become part of what makes the One Bite format so consistently compelling to watch, even for viewers who have never set foot in whatever town he happens to be visiting that week.
For Englewood, a visit from one of the country’s most-watched pizza reviewers offers a genuine moment in the spotlight for a shop that has spent decades serving the same community without needing outside validation to prove its worth. Whether Portnoy’s verdict lands as high praise or something more mixed, Crispy Crust Pizza’s place in Englewood’s local history, and its unlikely footnote in the origin story of hip-hop itself, was already secure long before Dave Portnoy ever walked through the door.
