Author Spotlight
Ben Henschel
Lawder DeSantis
Story by Ben Henschel.
Video by Lawder Desantis.
On an unspoken count of three, all six of them dug in. Surrounding tables in the cafeteria watched the SME Pizza Review Club like they’d paid to be there, but did so over their shoulder, quietly and covertly.
One of the six review boys nodded, approving the pizza and stripping the strung-out melted cheese off his face. Three of them winced sourly and slowed their chewing around the same time. One looked like he’d been poisoned and the last one almost keeled over.
“Rippage is horrible on this one,” sophomore Will Brooker said. “Sauce trench is pretty bad. 4.5, I’m thinking.”
Brooker rarely doesn’t finish the slice, he said, but he couldn’t finish that day. Then it was time to average out the scores.
It was another day, another review for the PRC — sophomores Blake Sowden, Will McClelland, Spencer Newton, Rob White, Max Holzbeierlein and Brooker. They were made to truthfully and speedily review the school’s Pizza Hut-provided pizza before the end of first lunch so students know what to expect and whether or not to buy it. At least, they’re pretty convinced as much.
“Since we have first lunch, we have the honor to be able to give the rest of the people ratings,” White said. “It’s really our obligation.”
“Call it a civic duty,” McClelland added.
The six made the official Instagram account — where they publish their daily reviews — and posted the first time on Sept. 6. By Sept. 20, they’d already picked up 467 followers. They’ve got 904 as of this writing, and among those followers are sme_office and East’s pep club. Needless to say, the school’s pretty convinced it’s destiny, they said.
Brooker said the need for daily reviews is high due to the variance in East’s day-to-day pizza quality — “not like a restaurant where it’s the same every time.” One week brought average scores of eight’s and above on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday — they don’t review on Thursdays due to different lunch plans — but Friday’s dipped to below a 5 average. Those are the toughest ways to end the week, they said.
Each review is based on an extensive, thorough scoring system that focuses on “a few” main things. But it’s more than just a few.
“There’s sauce, cheese quality, crust quality, topping density, sauce trenches, rippage,” McClelland said. “Then greasiness, bendage, unexpected sauce bubbles, crust bubbles, temperature and first bite.”
They’ve boiled pizza down to their own science with terms like the “sauce trench” — the sometimes-open area where the crust meets the cheese — or troublesome “sauce bubbles” that leak out after a bite, or even large, hollow “crust bubbles.”
“The worst [sauce bubbles] are the ones kind of, like, right below the sauce trench,” Brooker said. “All of it just sprays in and on your mouth and —”
“The whole slice is ruined,” McClelland said, finishing the thought. “Like you get it all over your shirt. Just a disgrace.”
The terms and point scale were mostly Brooker’s ideas. It’s safe to say he’s the brains of the operation. Brooker writes most of the reviews, some of which span 500 words in length, quoting works of Shakespeare and using almost exclusively flowery language (perhaps their most exquisitely written piece can be seen below).
Truthiness is paramount for the PRC — mostly because of Nola, one of East’s lunch ladies who runs one of the two daily pizza lines, they said. They’re like her cult followers.
To them, she’s “supreme leader, goddess of pizza, the MJ of pizza, the GOAT, the trap god, the pizza plug” and nine other names that draw royal imagery. On the days when Nola’s line’s long and the other’s short, they just have to stick it out.
The only thing worse than a bad slice after a near-perfect week would be slandering her pizza. She caught on to them quickly, they said, so she gives them “the best stuff” to keep the averages high.
Once the Instagram account was rolling, they knew they’d need a picture. So they walked up.
“Hey Nola, can we get a picture?” McClelland said, recounting the occurrence.
Nola blinked.
“I got pepperoni! I got sausage!” she said.
“No, your picture.”
“Y’all took my picture?”
Eventually, they did get their picture, and posted it as the cover image for their 100-follower pizza giveaway event. Any follower had to tag three of their friends in the comment section to be entered in a name randomizer.
61 Instagram users ended up commenting, but the PRC only gave one lucky winner an entire box of Nola’s Pizza Hut pizza.
They delivered it to the winner in social studies teacher Steve Klein’s class. In the middle of an 86-question exam.
“I mean yeah, that was an important test,” freshman Jack Shelton, who won the giveaway, said. “Everyone was kind of, like, pretty surprised that Klein wasn’t mad or anything.”
View this post on InstagramGiving back to the community as always @_jackshelton_ #blessed #godsplan #prc
A post shared by The Pizza Review Club (@sme_pizzareviewclub) on
Apart from their impact on Instagram and with students, the PRC’s made its way into the classroom, too — for better or worse.
One mainstay of teacher Kristin Anderson’s English 10H class is the question of the day, where she asks each student a designated question at the start of each period. For McClelland and Newton, it’s a marketing opportunity.
“There’s always a question of the day, and we do our best to make our answers all about pizza,” McClelland said. “She makes it a challenge to make her questions ‘pizza-proof,’ so it’s hard sometimes. But we always try to find a way.”
It’s gotten in the way sometimes, according to Anderson.
“I mean, at one point Will [McClelland] blatantly lied. It was something about going to Italy over spring break to review pizza,” Anderson said. “And I mean, it’s not good for kids to just lie.”
However, Anderson said the lying occurred only once and that their answers have since been mostly clever ways to incorporate pizza into her questions.
Beyond the classroom, and mostly behind closed doors, they can acknowledge the jokes and lack of convention of it all. The sense of how it really can be mostly a joke. But the business mindset takes over again pretty quickly.
Can it get out of hand? Yeah. Did it start off as a joke? Mostly. And did they make an Instagram for Nola through it all? Of course they did — @n0la__.
But with a newfound reputation with plenty left to build, they’re pouring it all in the captioned reviews with growing ambition and relentless sense of purpose.
“I mean it’s become a big thing, we got administrators walking down the hall being like ‘how’s the pizza looking today?’” McClelland said. “People come to us for it. We can’t let them down.”
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