I spend most of my time reorganizing shelves at a big box store, which is to say I spend most of my time trying to entertain my co-workers with my near perfect memory of the lyrics to 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” (my strength is the first verse), my flawless singing of the Miley Cyrus songbook and my hilarious tales of “being a writer” at a big box store. One evening recently, one of my 14 supervisors, a no-nonsense dude who I won’t name here, upon hearing my tale of writing for a pizza review site, had this to say:
“You should eat Rossi’s. It’s in Monona, and it’s the best pizza on the planet. It’s how pizza should be. You say you like Ian’s? Blegh. It’s gross compared to Rossi’s.”
I think I answered noncommittally out of fear, but holy shit, dude was on to something. There’s a giant ass sign outside of Rossi’s that calls it the best pizza on the planet too, and it’s probably the first sign that is totally true since that one I saw that asked if I was tired while driving when I totally was. Rossi’s is hands-down the best pizza I’ve had in my short time in Madison, to the point where I’m not even sure if it’s worth eating anywhere else. Which isn’t exactly the thing you want to feel when you review pizza for fun. Am I right, ladies?
The Good: Is there a way to put down everything here? I mean, Rossi’s travels in a fluffy thin crust that reminds me not of the cracker thin crust you can’t avoid in Wisconsin, but the kind of pizza I ate on my trip to NYC in 2004. The toppings come together like some Justice League of taste-bud asskickery, and they wreak havoc on the forces of evil congealing in your lower intestines. It’s like a fucking Picasso masterwork of pizza, pretty much. Plus their pizza comes in comically huge sizes, specifically a 20-inch and 30-inch variety, which is just bonkers. Though even a huge pizza can’t satiate you entirely on this stuff; my roommates and I mowed through a 20-inch in 15 minutes, and we all cried tears of sadness when we realized what he had done. It was that good. We should have known something seriously awesome was going down in that place: in the window by the kitchen, they have a giant tub of garlic. Any place with a giant tub of garlic in the window is basically the bestest.
And I haven’t even gotten to the Bosco sticks, these sticks of unholy concoction that are basically breaded logs of string cheese that are as addictive as uncut cocaine. Those are good too.
The Bad: Rossi’s has weird hours (only open at dinner, pretty much) and it’s take-out only. Though I don’t know if you’d want to eat there, since it looks like the room where me and my cousins were sequestered in my grandma’s house when she used to make what she called “turkey” at Thanksgiving. Which is to say, it smelled like an old person, had upholstered furniture, was dusty as a motherfucker, and looked as though the interior hadn’t been considered since about 1971. And it’s actually underneath another restaurant, called Rossitano’s, which is confusing as hell. But this doesn’t mean anything vis a vis the pizza.
Try: Fitting a 30-inch pizza into your car. One of the funniest pizza-related things I’ve ever seen was watching a delivery driver come out of the place carrying a box that had a 30-inch pizza. That’s too many trees and too much pizza, there, fella! Then he had to empty his trunk to put the pizza in, which was worth a few more giggles.
Rating: Hard to say, but I feel like Shit Just Got Real
