New York and Chicago may be pizza-famous, but their pies are small tomatoes next to D.C.’s jumbo slice. Often over a foot in length, a jumbo slice is a greasy swamp of cheese, sauce, and toppings, and thus the perfect pizza for Washington.
Of course, pizza joints all over the United States have served giant pies for decades, but size alone isn’t how jumbo slice became a distinct Washingtonian institution.
It all began in 1999, when Chris Chishti, the owner of Pizza Mart in the D.C. district of Adams Morgan, had a big ball of leftover dough that he rolled out into an 18-inch pizza. The novelty slices quickly caught on with the rising Adams Morgan bar scene, a hot spot for college students, budding policy wonks, and underpaid Hill staffers. Chishti rolled ’em bigger and bigger until his jumbo slice pizzas reached 32 inches in diameter.
Soon, other pizza joints in Adams Morgan began offering their own spin and served up rival pies. In 2003, former Chishti employee John Nasir opened a Pizza Boli’s chain three doors down from Pizza Mart, where he installed a taunting neon sign that read “Original Jumbo Slice.” The store’s manager, Kerry Guneri, explained: “I make the slices original,” he told the Washington City Paper. “My slice is as original as the way they’ve made it in Italy for 2,000 years.”
Chishti hit back a day later with a neon sign of his own: “Real Original Jumbo Slice.”
“Everyone knows who the original is,” Chishti told the City Paper. “That’s why we put ‘Real Original’ up there. They come in and try to steal our idea.” And a few months later, he posted another sign: “First Oldest Original Jumbo Slice.”
But fans didn’t care who made the real original jumbo slice, as long as it was greasy and hot. Some of those who reveled in the institution’s early days still recall its toxic allure. “Don’t eat it sober. Not the same,” a 2005 George Washington University graduate told the Washington Examiner via email. “I can’t even find this place sober,” another 2005 GW grad said.
Still another GW former jumbo slice fan offered his vivid recollection of the carnage after a night of carousing.
“50/50 split on what’s more sad: actually eating your whole jumbo slice or accidentally dropping your jumbo slice facedown and having to leave it to congeal on the sidewalk overnight,” he wrote. “What unlucky souls are tasked with cleaning up all the jumbo slices on the D.C. sidewalks every morning?”
Jumbo mania reached fever pitch in 2010, when Travel Channel’s “Food Wars” filmed an episode about Chishti’s feud with his former employees’ knock-off restaurants, specifically the eponymous Jumbo Slice, operated by his younger brother. In one of the episode’s most telling moments, in a montage of drunks sinking their teeth into giant triangles, a woman shivering in line outside Pizza Mart confesses her love for jumbo slice to “Food Wars” host Camille Ford.
“It’s big, it’s juicy, and it’s everything a girl could want,” she slurs. “And it goes great with dirty martinis.”
The 22-minute episode is a time capsule for a D.C. still caught up in the excesses of the early aughts. Life seems like a stumble from hangover to hangover to glorious high with extra cheese.
The District’s new trendiness in the Obama years nearly wrung jumbo slice dry, as the farm-to-table institutions in the H Street corridor replaced Adams Morgan as the city’s most prominent nightlife hangout. But this jumbo slice is a pizza too big to fail. It has slid out of the public eye, but only because it is quietly becoming ensconced in D.C. ritual. First came the “U Street Taco,” a half-smoke hotdog from Ben’s Chili Bowl wrapped in a jumbo slice from Pizza Mart. Then came the “Mumbo Jumbo,” a jumbo slice slathered in spicy mumbo sauce, a condiment dreamed up in the federal capital. All this outsize pizza needs now is a celebrity hero, and it’ll be a bona fide D.C. legend. Too bad security cameras never caught the late Marion Barry stumbling out of a jumbo joint.
For now, a jumbo slice run is a gentle part of local residents’ after-hours routines, whether or not driven by alcohol-fueled craving. Mike McPherson, a student at the Catholic University of America, said he only goes to Pizza Mart if the night calls: “When it’s 2 a.m., nothing sounds better than a big ol’ slice of pizza.”
And like so many others, McPherson can never find Pizza Mart on his own. Jumbo fans all hang together. He follows a friend.
Nic Rowan is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.
