Slice 1: Wiseguy Pizza

The first establishment I hit up is Wiseguy Pizza, and I immediately like the name. It’s two minutes from the Pentagon, it has a 4.8-star rating, and if my military office is planning some clandestine operation against a mustachioed dictator, I wouldn’t want my staff settling for anything less.

But then I notice the first crack in the theory: their hours. On weekdays, Wiseguy closes at 9 p.m. This is not the operating schedule of a business supposedly fueling America’s after-hours national security apparatus. If the Pentagon is truly driving midnight pizza spikes like the Internet claims, a place this close would be open later, even if only out of patriotic obligation.

Or perhaps they haven’t heard. Either way, I’m determined to get to the bottom of this.

Guillermo greets me with a gentle smile. I order a single bottle of Coke, because it feels like the least I can do while conducting a semi-classified investigation of this national importance.

I have in mind some hard data from last summer. With Israel–Iran tensions reaching a fever pitch, the Pentagon Pizza Index suddenly went from niche trivia to full-blown Internet sport, and the account tracking the spikes drew a surge of attention. Shortly before Israel struck Iran, the Twitter-X account @PenPizzaReport that tracks pizza activity in real time posted: “As of 6:59pm ET nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity.” Similar spikes were reported ahead of the US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites a week and a half later.

I explain that I’m a reporter looking into the rumored correlation between the busyness of local pizza joints and major Pentagon activity, and then ask the obvious follow-up: Why not stay open later and cash in on World War III?

Guillermo introduces me to Anna, the manager. She hears my pitch and immediately makes it clear this is above her pay grade.

Still, Anna takes a full page of meticulous notes about who I am and what I’m investigating. Within minutes, the request climbs the corporate ladder, all the way up to the Director of Operations, who declines to meet the weight of the moment. The question gets bumped up again all the way to the VP of Marketing, who is still looking into the matter to this day.

I have been waiting for a response ever since, which, in fairness, is exactly how most government investigations end. Now I’m starting to think that they don’t actually close at 9 p.m. They only close to the public at 9 p.m.

In Data We Crust

Before I head to pizza emporium number two, some history. The Pentagon Pizza Index didn’t begin as a meme. It was once a man with a phone line and a map. In January 1991, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about pizza deliveries in the nation’s capital that were veering off into the realm of espionage. The central character was Frank Meeks, a Domino’s franchise owner in the Washington area, who told the paper that late-night deliveries to the national security ecosystem had become a kind of accidental warning system.

Meeks claimed that the CIA’s one-night record for late-night deliveries was set at 21 pies on August 1, 1990, the night before Iraq invaded Kuwait. The L.A. Times story also described how, in the run-up to Desert Storm, late-night Pentagon deliveries climbed dramatically. Meeks said they had increased “steadily,” citing a rise from three to 101 late-night deliveries on a single weeknight, plus 55 pizzas delivered to the White House in a four-hour window. In other words: While the world was staring at troop movements and oil fields, Meeks was staring at order counts and thinking, something is happening….

As the theory later calcified into lore, it grew “prequels.” Earlier episodes emerged, noting that pizza orders the night before the US invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989) doubled. Because as the theory alleges, the closer Washington gets to war, the more it starts eating like a group of high school girls during midterm exams.

This phenomenon may trace its origins back in the Cold War era. According to a Euronews report, Soviet intelligence services may have monitored unusually heavy pizza deliveries in Washington as a crude way of gauging whether the US was sliding into crisis mode.

Slice Two: California Pizza Kitchen

Next, I hit California Pizza Kitchen, right around the corner, and it has an entirely different vibe. It’s upscale enough that there’s an actual maître d’ asking if I have a reservation. Except this time, I’m the one asking the questions.

My first thought: No way the Pentagon goes through this kind of formality.

My second thought: Wait… that’s exactly why they would.

Nothing says “clandestine” like a polite host and a laminated menu.

The maître d’ calls for backup. Before long, Private Citizen Jake is shaking hands with General Manager Bob, a rank that feels appropriately Pentagon-adjacent. If any man was going to confirm or deny the existence of this phenomenon, it would be someone with the authority to say, “I can state as the general manager that we’ve been getting a lot of unusual orders lately.”

I tell him about the theory, which involves squaring pi.

Online trackers watch publicly visible activity signals, mostly from Google Maps, which shows two key things: first, an establishment’s typical busyness by day and hour, known as “Popular Times”; and second, a real-time snapshot of how crowded it appears right now — often phrased as “Live” busyness or “busier than usual.”

The Pentagon Pizza Index crowd monitors multiple pizza restaurants in a tight radius around the Pentagon and looks for sudden changes, especially later at night, when pizza spikes feel less like dinner traffic and more like “something’s going on.” When several nearby shops light up at once, or one shop shows a sharp surge that’s out of pattern, believers treat it like a red flag — not proof of action, but a possible sign that the building is unusually active and feeding a lot of people who aren’t going home for dinner.

The important thing to understand is what the index isn’t measuring. It isn’t tracking actual Pentagon orders, and it isn’t tapping into delivery apps. It’s basically using public, approximate crowd indicators as a proxy for intensity in the neighborhood.

That’s why it lives in the gray zone between clever and ridiculous. The method is real and the numbers exist, but the conclusion is a leap. It’s one step above “trust me, bro,” and one step below “confirmed military operation,” which the Internet has determined to the sweet spot. In his half-dozen years on the job, General Manager Bob says he has never even heard of it. Has he never been on the Internet, I wonder, or was he instructed to play dumb? Perhaps this is a collusion between the Deep State and deep dish, I muse.

“It’s just not the case,” he assures me.

Do they get Pentagon business? Yes.

Do they suddenly get massive spikes in a single night that suggest something huge is underway? No.

I walk out with a can of Sprite and a receipt potent enough to validate my parking.

Slice Three: We the Pizza

For my next stop, I aimed for variety. I hit up We the Pizza, because from the name alone, sounds like it should come with a complimentary flag pin and a classified briefing. If the Pentagon had an official pizza outlet, surely it would have a name like this.

The operation here is smaller, and currently complicated by the fact that they’ve shifted locations. They’re sharing space with another restaurant owned by the same person but operating independently. Google Maps still sends customers to the wrong storefront two doors down. It’s been a year. I wonder how many Pentagon deliveries could’ve emanated from here if not for the confusion. Then again, imagine if they had been two doors off from the Maduro residence….

There’s no general manager, no director of operations, just a young woman behind the counter. Business is slow. She tells me most of their activity is DoorDash and UberEats, and she has no idea where the food is going once it leaves the building.

And that’s the first time I really felt the modern flaw in the whole Pizza Index theory. In 1991, when you ordered pizza, you talked to a human and gave an address. In 2026, you press a button and a stranger with a Bluetooth headset appears like a summoned creature.

Still, she says she’s seen no spikes. No sudden rush that would make her look up and say, “Either the Pentagon is planning something, or the free world collectively forgot how to cook.”

Nothing.

From the Pentagon itself, there’s flat-out denial. In a recent statement to Newsweek, a Pentagon spokesperson brushed off the idea that outside pizza orders could be some kind of geopolitical smoke signal, reminding the public that, inside the building, “There are many pizza options available inside the Pentagon — also sushi, sandwiches, doughnuts, coffee, etc.”

And there’s another oddity about the Pentagon. If the Pentagon Pizza Index is such a clean idea, then why did it spend so many years in the witness protection program? Why wasn’t this a recurring obsession during the Iraq War, the surge years, the Bin Laden raid, the Syria red line, or any of the dozens of moments when Washington was clearly up all night deciding history?

If pizza really is the unofficial fuel of American power, you’d think the Internet would’ve been watching the ovens the entire time. And yet the Pizza Index mostly sat dormant for decades, mentioned occasionally as a weird Gulf War footnote, until it suddenly reemerged in the mid-2020s.

There’s a pretty simple reason the Pentagon Pizza Index seems to vanish from the record between the early ’90s and 2025. In 1991 it worked because it was novel and quotable. A Domino’s franchise owner telling reporters that late-night government orders spiked before major events. But it wasn’t easily verifiable or repeatable as a continuing story, and without modern tools, there was no live “signal” for the public to track. You would’ve needed delivery logs, cooperative managers, and a reporter willing to cold-call pizza shops for weeks.

From the late ’90s through the Iraq-Afghanistan years, Washington lived in a near-permanent state of “long hours plus crisis” metabolism. If everything is a crisis, then pizza is no longer an omen, it’s just Tuesday.

What changed by the mid-2020s was Internet capability and culture. Real-time location and “busier than usual” indicators made pizza activity feel trackable in the way it never was before, turning the old anecdote into something that felt measurable and an index you could refresh like a stock chart. Before long, social media accounts were packaging this into instant, shareable alerts. Once geopolitics heated up again and the Internet was primed to treat any weird data point as potential open-source intelligence (OSINT), the old folklore returned, upgraded from trivia into a trend.

Slice Four: Extreme Pizza

Back on the trail I reached Extreme Pizza, which is, in spirit and architecture, the exact opposite of CPK. It’s part pizza shop, part bar, and it has stacks of boxes towering in a way that suggests they are ready for volume. This is the type of place that looks prepared to feed an entire branch of the armed services on 15 minutes’ notice.

Brian, the manager, is the head honcho. I show him an app that tracks activity at pizza establishments near the Pentagon and ask if he’s familiar with this.

He doesn’t even blink. Reporters, he says, have been asking him about it for the past six months.

So I go for the obvious follow-up: “Even with this on your radar… you haven’t noticed anything?”

Brian tells me business over the holidays is always slow, and there’s usually an uptick in early January. These are normal seasonal patterns. But the dramatic spikes the Internet loves? Not really.

Then he drops the most important data point of my entire pizza tour: The Pentagon has cut access.

They used to deliver there regularly. Sometimes small orders, sometimes bigger ones. But now, he says, deliveries are restricted. Extreme Pizza doesn’t get those orders anymore.

He believes, speculatively, that there’s a Pizza Hut operating inside the Pentagon absorbing the business.

Brian is reluctant to kill the thrill of the theory. “I like to believe it’s real,” he admits.

But he’s been working there for nearly ten years, and he hasn’t seen anything dramatic enough to match the legend.

He remembers the Venezuela operation being discussed among coworkers on what was a particularly slow day. He checked the numbers and shrugged: nothing out of the ordinary. Nominal, right on par. No sudden “Oh, no, the world is ending” surge.

They can handle about 40 pies an hour, he tells me. They’ve done huge orders — from Amazon, for example — but even that has slowed down.

“Perhaps they’ve been weaning their robots off pizza,” I suggest.

We laugh.

I reach for a Dr. Pepper and Brian gives me the most valuable lead of all: If I want Pentagon pizza truth, I should go to Nighthawk Pizza.

Slice Five: Nighthawk Pizza

Nighthawk is the biggest operation of the five, and it’s not just a pizza joint. It’s a pizza joint that swallowed a small entertainment district.

There’s an ice-skating rink outside. Inside, there’s a full bar, arcades, and enough nooks and crannies that you could hold a diplomatic summit without anyone noticing.

The second I tell the woman behind the counter that I’m here to investigate an “Internet story,” a man slides over like he’s been trained for this.

William, the manager, four years in the role, takes over instantly.

“Pizza-gate, Pizza-gate,” he says, before I even finish my first sentence.

Now, to be clear: Pizza-gate is a separate conspiracy theory from the 2016 election era discussed in the darker parts of the right-wing web. But William tells me people call this that too, just because they don’t know what else to call it.

And here’s the thing: Unlike every other shop I visited, William says plainly that most of their business is from the Pentagon, especially in the afternoon hours. He gestures to rows and rows of tables that had been packed earlier with “Pentagon guys, captains to three-stars, four-stars.”

Nighthawk isn’t where the Pentagon goes for secrecy. It’s where the Pentagon goes to chill. He describes it as an “in-house, casual Pentagon hangout spot.” The vibe is less “war room” and more “let’s pretend we’re normal civilians with normal civilian problems like choosing toppings.”

William says Pentagon staff usually dine in, not takeout. But when they get an order of 20 pizzas to go, people draw conclusions. They assume something big is happening.

Has he seen the legendary late-night surge?

No.

And then he says the line that may be the final nail in the Internet theory’s crust: “They’ve got a whole little center inside there.”

Meaning: The Pentagon doesn’t need the local pizza economy when it has its own internal pizza supply chain.

What William has seen, though, is the afterlife of the rumor itself. A year ago, he says, a Massachusetts radio station started calling pizza joints in the area asking about the phenomenon. Afterward, managers compared notes.

And that’s when my investigation took a turn I didn’t expect. William recommends Extreme Pizza as a solid place to ask.

I tell him I just came from there, and that they recommended him.

William bursts out laughing.

Apparently, on slow days, some managers amuse themselves by playing telephone with out-of-state reporters, sending them on a pizza pilgrimage from shop to shop like it’s a local sport. They’ll entertain it on the phone. They’ll feed the rumor mill. But if you show up in person? They’ll tell you the truth:

It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s folklore. But they haven’t seen anything real enough to prove it.

B-2 or not 2-B — The Verdict

After five establishments, one undeniable conclusion emerges:

If the Pentagon Pizza Index exists as the Internet imagines it, a late-night surge so dramatic it signals impending military action, it’s either rarer than people think, or it’s been moved indoors, absorbed into the Pentagon’s own food infrastructure like every other government function. Unless the managers of these establishments have been bought off by the Deep State or the data is being manipulated.

The pizza shops I visited weren’t hiding anything. They weren’t winking. They weren’t mysteriously “too busy to talk.” Most of them hadn’t even heard the theory until reporters started calling. And the ones who had heard it seemed to treat it the same way America treats most Internet myths: with a smile, a shrug, and a vague hope that maybe the legend is true, because it’s more interesting than real life behind a counter on a slow day.

But the real story isn’t whether pizza predicts foreign policy. It’s that people want it to. Because in an age of delayed briefings, sanitized statements, and “we’re monitoring the situation closely,” the idea that you could read geopolitics through a pizza tracker from your personal handheld device is comfortingly human.

It’s interesting that the PenPizzaReport account that’s been tracking activity regularly for the past 18 months still isn’t sure if what they’ve been dedicating their life to is actually indicative of anything. Even on the day when they predicted abnormally high activity ahead of Israel’s strikes on Iran, the user admitted that if there was any truth to this method, surely the Pentagon would figure out a way to manipulate the data.

“I also wonder how much of this data could be manipulated, or if it even would be worth the effort,” they responded to a commentor’s suggestion of such, adding: “I used to check Wiseguy Pizza for information (it’s even closer to the Pentagon than Extreme Pizza) but suddenly one day Google stopped showing traffic levels for that company.”

We want our geopolitics served with a side of simplicity because we want the world to make sense. So we watch the heat bars, we screenshot the spikes, we refresh, we speculate; and we convince ourselves that we’re not paranoid. Maybe pizza doesn’t predict war and maybe it never did. Maybe the whole thing is just a delicious coincidence that got upgraded into an Internet religion.

Still, one thing became very clear. Even if the Pentagon Pizza Index isn’t measuring foreign policy, it’s measuring us and our obsession with knowing what the grown-ups are doing behind closed doors.

After all five stops, the Pizza Index still feels like it has just enough historical precedent to sound plausible, just enough modern data to look scientific, and just enough humor to spread like a rumor. And if the world ever does tip into crisis again on a random Tuesday night, I know what I’ll be doing. Following the Internet’s lead and pounding refresh on the activity page of various local pizza joints.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1096)