I don’t like to brag (I love to brag), but when I’m not checking in with  hardly edited and cuss-filled pizza reviews from a city most people in  Wisconsin openly hate (Madison), I’m writing mildly edited  dispatches about the very bad British band Yuck and children rappists  (or rappers, if you prefer). I’m what STD doctors call a “music  blogger” and in that capacity, I recently went to SXSW in Austin, TX.  Are you aware of it? It is a long line of people in Austin, TX, that  somehow involves music, in some capacity. I guess bands play there,  and I went to see many of them (I saw 50 shows in four days). Do you  have an opinion on Dom? I do, since I saw him twice in 48 hours.  Were you at the show that Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All  played where they told Billboard to go fuck itself? I was.

Before I made my sojourn to the land of sunburn, pretty great bands that will never be big someday, and reams of 20-year-old girls who remind me I’m at the point where I can’t even relate to someone five years younger than me, I had a brief G-Chat conversation with Doctors of Za capo T. Mario where he implored me to write about Austin pizza. Like I had a choice: When you’re at SXSW, you eat all of your meals standing up, on a curb, over a paper plate, before later expelling that food in a watery mist into a dirty club toilet six hours later (or was that just me?), and pizza is easily the most paper-plate/curb friendly food on earth. Add the facts that I generally don’t like barbecue sauce, and that I eat pizza for about every meal when I’m NOT at a music festival with pizza as the cheapest food option, and even T. Mario had to know I was going to be eating a shit ton of za.

So here’s a survey of the four different places I ate pizza at. Where they any good? Not really. Were they better than Iron Works, the barbecue place I ate at, where Diddy and Cassie and their entourages cut in line in front of me (seriously)? No. But they had cheese. And other pizza-related things! Which is what this website is all about!

Roppolo’s: I ate this pizza my first night in Austin, when I was experiencing some serious crotch chafing and some asshole sweat problems I’ll refer only to as “legendary.” Did Roppolo’s assuage these problems? Nope. It was just serviceable pizza with spicy pepperoni. I ate two slices and took a shower afterward. Neither one felt good. I would bet that the lines I saw at Roppolo’s all week had less to do with the quality of pizza, and more to do with it being on the main drag of SXSW, right in the perfect place to capitalize on people expecting nothing but empty calories and vaguely shitty pizza.

Pizzeria Paparazzi: I passed this place multiple times before actually venturing in: It was across the street from my hotel, and, thanks to its blaring soundtrack of ‘80s hits, was like a antidote to the stream of terrible “alt”-country bands that populated the streets during the fest. However, it was, without question, the worst food I ate all festival, and that includes a monumentally shitty BBQ sandwich at Stubb’s. Imagine your high school cafeteria workers banding together to start a pizza place, and then deciding to just get materials from the same distributors that provided the food for hot lunch. And then, when they were making the pizza, they decided to take it out before it was completely cooked, and use cheese that is only cheese in name. And Pizzeria Paparazzi was just like that. I heard my best food related banter afterwards though: A dude said, “They call that New York pizza? Fuck that!” when he was leaving. I don’t want to get libelous, but I’m sure this pizza is what caused me to have knee weakening stomach problems during my publication’s official showcase.

The Onion: This was a place called the Onion, and it had a newsstand for copies of The Onion, and the pizza was pretty good. I honestly don’t remember that much about it, beyond those facts. Also, I know it went well with Stella Artois. But I wasn’t that drunk: My days sort of became a haze in there. In a midst of dumb haircuts, James Blake and meeting more people in 12 hours than I have in four years, I forgot about what the pizza was like.

Ironically, the best pizza I had all fest wasn’t from Austin at all: It was from Roberta’s, a Brooklyn pizza place that set up a stall at the Fader Fort throughout the Fort’s run. For those not in the know, or without VIP passes (not bragging), Fader magazine has a mini-festival every year, and it is the tits. They book whoever they want, and the music is tops. Fader Fort also isn’t a slave to the overwhelming shittiness of Austin pizza either: Roberta’s was the second best meal I had all week, and I ate a cheese pizza on a giant pillow in a blogger’s lounge, which is about the douchiest combination of pizza type, location, and seating equipment you can imagine in Mad Gabs. But still! The Neapolitan pizza I ate in that blogger’s lounge was just the 100% best. Too bad it was my first pizza of the trip, and everything else pizza-related didn’t stack up. Not even seeing that Cassie is as hot in person as she is in my dreams (she eats pizza with me in my dreams, is what I’m saying).

Reviews, Texas