By Brady Drake
"This is pretty good. Better than I thought it was going to be to be honest. There's that crunch. It has that cardboard outside. This is pretty good. Pretty good pizza from the Rhombus Guys! I wasn't expecting much out of North Dakota because when I think of North Dakota I think Ice Hockey, I think winter, I think Fargo even though that could be South Dakota and I think like I don't know, cold weather and like cows... Pretty good Rhombus Guys. I'm gonna go 6.8. I think this is a really good pizza. It could've even been a 7.1." -Dave Portnoy's review of Rhombus Guys pizza. Dave Portnoy Founder of Barstool Sports
Many restaurants throughout the country rely on reviews to boost their businesses' reputation, however, few reviews can boost a business like Dave Portnoy's pizza reviews. Rhombus Guys, a pizza company located in Grand Forks and Fargo, North Dakota, found that out after receiving a positive review from the Barstool Sports founder on May 3, leading their website to crash that evening due to an influx of visitors. To learn more about how Rhombus Guys pizza ended up in Portnoy's review, we sat down with Rhombus Guys Owner Matt Winjum. How did the idea come about to send the pizza to be reviewed by Portnoy? Matt Winjum: I'm familiar with who Dave is and I was familiar with his pizza reviews prior to COVID-19. However, I was not aware that he started doing frozen pizza reviews until it was brought up to me by a few different friends of mine in a short period of time. They urged me to send him something, but I didn't, originally, think that I had very much time with the way things had been changing due to the pandemic. But, by the third or fourth person, I decided I have to check it out. After watching some of the previous frozen pizza reviews, I decided I should give it a try, but I didn't know where to go from there. How do you send a pizza that quickly without it spoiling? Winjum: I had no idea where I was supposed to send this pizza or how to get in touch with Portnoy. There was nothing on the Barstool Sports website about how to get him the pizza. So, I asked a friend who had told me that I should do this how to send it and he was able to find the address off of a package during one of Portnoy's unboxing. Once I had the address, I had to figure out how to send it. I called FedEx and UPS to find out if they had any sort of frozen shipping solutions, neither of them did. So, I reached out to my friend, Jeff Tellman, who owns Red Pepper. Tellman has a contract to ship things overnight at an accelerated rate, so, he was able to help me out. It got to the address and was signed for about 18 hours later and I didn't know what was going to happen from there?
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JUNE 2020