Rossi's makes some freakin' huge pizzas

As American waistlines have expanded outward against draw-stringed pants, so has this nation’s lust for increasingly gigantic pizzas. In Madison, residents need look no further than Monona for coffee table-eclipsing pizzas. Putting national predecessors like Pizza Hut’s Bigfoot to shame, Rossi’s (100 Frost Woods Road, Monona, 608-222-5115) sells a mammoth 30-inch pizza, which produces triangle slices of a whopping 15 inches—bigger than most plates, storage containers, and esophagi. Creating a pizza that large is a daring choice for a restaurant as small as Rossi’s, which is actually underneath Rossario’s, and logistically it creates multiple challenges for the staff. The A.V. Club talked with Rossi’s owner Ross Parisi about what goes into making and delivering each 30-inch pie.

Preparation: Each $32 (plus $5 per topping), hand-tossed, 30-inch pizza begins life as four pounds of cheese and three pounds of dough. Once toppings are added—a pepperoni pizza comes with 70 individual pepperonis, for instance—it crosses over to party-pizza-only territory. “I think the mental part is challenging,” he said. “I mean, my goodness, just looking at how big it is. Is your constitution ready for that? I don’t think most people could sit down and eat 70 pepperonis, nonetheless eat everything else.”

Presentation: Think the large amount of the ingredients to make the pizza is impressive? Consider this: How does that pizza get out of the oven? Parisi had to have two gigantic wooden boards custom made in order to remove the pizza from the massive ovens.

But that’s not the only custom piece of equipment needed to deliver these monsters: Rossi’s had to order special boxes and special heated bags, both of which are comical in magnitude. But those pale in comparison to the enormous cutter, which Parisi said “looks like it’s from the Middle Ages.” The cutter needs to be that big because few people have the wingspan to cut the pizza with a traditional pizza cutter.

Parisi encourages every costumer to get the pizza cut into one-inch squares, a total of 40, as opposed to huge, unwieldy slices. About 90 percent of people ordering the 30-inch do, said Parisi, because “That way, people can finish what’s on their plates, and you can serve 10 to 15 people.”

Delivery: Rossi’s 30-inch pizza actually began life at 32 inches, but Parisi ran into a problem: It was too big to fit through apartment doors, making delivery impossible. “At the very least you can put a 30-inch through someone’s porch door,” Parisi said. “Anything bigger and you’d have to eat it in the garage.”

But the 30-inch pizza is still a challenge to deliver. Head to Rossi’s on a busy night, and you’ll see something happen frequently; delivery drivers clearing their trunks to make room for the pizza since it’s too large to fit in their backseats. But even then, some car trunks aren’t big enough.

And even then, getting the pizza to someone’s place is no guarantee you can actually get it in the doors. “This one time, we delivered to this apartment complex [in Monona] and for whatever reason, we couldn’t get the pizza into their front door. I don’t know if they made that front door a little smaller or something,” Parisi said. “But basically they reached over the second floor and we stood on boxes and passed the pizza up to their patio. And the patio door was just big enough to get it in.”

All those logistical problems might have prevented other pizza places from offering a 30-inch pizza, but it’s just part of the anything goes spirit down at Rossi’s, which also serves Nathan’s Hot Dogs, Bosco Sticks (basically breadsticks with string cheese in the middle), and at one time, Spaghetti-Os. “We kind of serve whatever we feel like here,” said Parisi.

Here's some random (and shaky) footage of a 30-inch pizza in action: