Pizza is in high demand at the Pentagon as of late. | Illustration by Leo Lee
Pizza places near the Pentagon got a spike in business over this past week of international warfare – and one social media account may have actually predicted the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.
On Saturday, June 21, at 7:13 p.m. EST – shortly before President Donald Trump announced via Truth Social of the U.S. bunker-buster attack, Pentagon Pizza Report tracked a “HIGH activity [of sales] at the closest Papa Johns to the Pentagon.”
@PenPizzaReport’s account is dedicated to “open-source tracking of pizza spot activity around the Pentagon (and other places).” The X handle went live last August — months before the 2024 election — and it already has over 203,000 followers.
One local pizza operation also showed a big boost in traffic during the wee hours of Monday night, just as ceasefire talks between Iran and Israel were coming to light. Pizzato Pizza, the year-old Lyon Park pie shop located a four-minute drive from the Pentagon, stays open until 3 a.m. (Nearby Domino’s and Papa Johns, meanwhile, close at midnight.) Pizzato counts spicy vodka pepperoni and chicken barbecue pizza as some of its most popular orders. Partner Ali Hatim runs Mumbai Darbar Indian Cuisine in Alexandria, so there’s also butter chicken and chicken tikka pizzas (2626 N. Pershing Drive). We, The Pizza, the chain from Top Chef star Spike Mendelsohn, as well as Extreme Pizza and area Domino’s outposts also continued to experience a sales boom on Tuesday afternoon.
Pizza appears to be the pre-strike meal of choice for top U.S. military officials who are hunkered down in the Pentagon, per the Guardian. Deliveries to the high-profile Arlington address reportedly doubled right before the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, and jumped again before Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Of course, there wasn’t any social media around back then to track such surges.
The five-sided structure is home to one pie option, Mosaic Pizza Company, but hours are only 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Pentagon’s lengthy concessions roster shows a Five Guys is coming soon to its food court.
It’s been about two months since Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Commanders announced their proposal to build a new, publicly funded football stadium at RFK. Since then, they’ve been insisting in all possible forums that doing so will generate billions in revenue for the District.
Meanwhile, the DC Council, and members of the public, have asked for data that back up the grandiose claims. The team has stonewalled. Bowser, for her part, released an “economic impact report,” on June 5, 2025—now seemingly removed from District websites—that does nothing more than tout the same misleading numbers, just with a fancier page layout.
Now that we have an RFK-specific “report” in hand to dissect, here’s what’s wrong with it.
They’re owned by whom?
To produce the “report,” the executive hired a firm called Convention, Sports, and Leisure. CSL is owned by Legends Hospitality, which acquired it in 2011. Legends Hospitality was founded by the owners of the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees, and they retain an ownership stake in the company.
The value of the Cowboys and the Yankees, as with any sports team, is based in part on the comparative value of other teams. And, each new stadium subsidy deal functionally sets a new floor for how much taxpayers will be ripped off for the next one. So, it’s obvious that Legends has an absolutely wild incentive to ensure that the firm it owns delivers whatever numbers will secure the bag for fellow owners.
Legends also handles concessions, ticket sales, and merchandising at sports venues, another conflict of interest for CSL: The construction of larger, fancier facilities will likely boost its related lines of business. In one instance, CSL produced an “economic impact report” for the Los Angeles Angels’ stadium at the same time that Legends, its corporate parent, was bidding on the team’s concessions contract.
2003: CSL projected that an expanded convention center in Philadelphia and new one in the District would boost annual hotel stays by 56% and 103%, respectively. Hotel stays instead declined 26% and 23%.
2012: CSL projected expanded attendance and spending as a result of a new football stadium at Colorado State University based on unreliable survey data and “an incomplete, and rather unconventional, method of projecting future attendance.” It further posited that revenue growth at a rarely-sold-out college venue would outstrip revenue growth at the average new NFL stadium.
2019: CSL boosted Montreal as a prime candidate for Major League Baseball expansion via numbers that didn’t account for the US-Canada exchange rate.
2023: CSL projected a new hockey arena in Tempe, Ariz., would lead to $796.5 million in new hotel spending. A local economist there found CSL overstated its estimate by a magnitude of at least 50.
2024: CSL claimed that a new arena in Philadelphia—a few miles away from an existing arena—would draw more events to the city. Its justification for this claim was a comparison to another pair of arenas, one on Long Island and one in New Jersey, that are 50 miles apart.
CSL was also commissioned by the District in 2014 to provide a “report” when the city was considering what taxpayer dollars to turn over to DC United for that team’s new stadium. CSL initially said the District would reap $109 million in benefits, but had to issue a public retraction admitting it miscounted $70 million of that. We would be long ousted from our career fields for something like this, but cities apparently continue to find much to like in CSL’s miscountings.
Show us the money
The biggest problem with the “report” itself, beyond its providence, is that it’s not a report. Since it doesn’t articulate the basis of its assumptions, it’s more accurate to describe it as an underpants-gnomes slideshow of slick tables and bold-type numbers that distract from how unfounded its claims of profit are.
For instance, CSL asserts that there will be 1.4 million attendees at stadium events per year, that 40% of them will be from out of town, and that those out-of-towners will spend between $65.00 and $324.50 outside of the stadium. There’s no indication of what those numbers are based on.
In the last piece we wrote together, we showed how “economic impact reports” count revenue that would be generated anyway. A family going to a Commanders game is probably going instead of, not in addition to, a Capitals game. That’s not net new spending. CSL claims to have subtracted such figures from its suggested total impact, but doesn’t show how much was subtracted. You will simply need to trust that CSL’s judgment is sound.
CSL promises it’s accounting for only net spending. Just don’t ask to see how.
House of cards
Even if you take CSL’s mystery numbers at face value, the premises of its assessment of the Bowser-Commanders deal are untrue. Primarily, CSL presents the alternative to a Commanders stadium at RFK as “no stadium.” It is, rather, “stadium six miles away in Maryland.”
All the direct, indirect, and induced spending of a Commanders stadium will be the same for the region’s economy regardless of whether it’s in the District, or subsidized with District residents’ dollars, because there will be a Commanders stadium in the region. So, we think it’s fair to cross out the entire stadium-output portion of CSL’s analysis, which is $24.5 billion of the total $33.5 billion in revenue boasted of in the firm’s slide deck.
CSL: Not so hot at math, nor spelling. Image by the author.
Similarly, CSL’s analysis also counts the full benefit of the mixed-use “distrcit” [sic], as if the alternative to that is no development at RFK whatsoever. But that’s not even what Bowser is saying—she’s pushing the stadium as necessary to accelerate development that would happen regardless. But in CSL-world, construction on mixed-use development at RFK won’t start until 2029 and won’t be completed until 2036 anyway.
Nick has previously explained why Bowser’s claim of stadium-induced development warp-speed is a dubious one. If the mayor wants people to believe her, it’s in her interest for her consultants to at least gesture at demonstrating how many years a stadium would lop off the emergence of a neighborhood. That would, however, result in much smaller numbers than those on CSL’s slide deck. If the stadium sped up additional development by a decade (again, this strains credulity), the revenue generated as a result would still be just one-third of what’s shown in CSL’s deck—because CSL is taking credit for the presumed 30-year value of mixed-use development overall, when it should only be doing so for the acceleration of that development.
Image by the author.
The estimated fiscal impact of the stadium itself—i.e., the tax revenue the District is proposing to steal from Maryland—is the messiest and sneakiest feature of CSL’s deck. The report counts $2.4 billion in this category and includes a chart breaking that total into its component parts, per year, shown below.
But the math isn’t mathing: $63.7 million times 30 years, plus $29.2 million in construction taxes, is only $1.94 billion, which is $459 million short of $2.4 billion. CSL appears to have inflated the revenue that might be generated over the 30-year life of the stadium, but doesn’t say how, or by how much, it did so, leaving a half-billion dollars completely unexplained.
More troubling is that the report fails to account for the fact that Bowser’s term sheet promises back to the Commanders the projected $958.1 million in ticket revenue to, first, pay off their bonds and, then, fund ongoing capital improvements to the stadium. Ticket revenue is the single biggest component of CSL’s total taxes number, but, per the term sheet, it won’t be available to the District in any way. It should be subtracted from the total.
So, the best-case revenue-generating scenario for the District that we can discern, after weeding out the most glaring of CSL’s baseless assumptions, is $1 billion in stadium taxes ($1.45 if CSL can explain the mystery $459 million), plus maybe another $1 billion-ish in taxes generated by a mixed-use development that has come online possibly faster than it might have otherwise, over 30 years.
Even that’s an unlikely estimate: When Bowser announced the Wharf’s redevelopment in 2017, she claimed it would generate $100 million in tax revenue annually. Seven years later, all built out, the total collected was exactly half that.
Image by the author.
Local journalists have picked up on the shoddiness of CSL’s “report.” But when NBC News4’s investigative reporting team approached the mayor’s office for the missing information, they were given the runaround. Bowser will have to come forward with a lot more information if she wants the District’s taxpayers to grant CSL’s numbers any credibility. For now, let’s not.
Top image: The “economic impact report” on a subsidized Commanders stadium at RFK touted by Mayor Muriel Bowser is by the book, and it’s not a good book. The consultant, CSL, miscounted by $70 million in an earlier projection for the District, on what became Audi Field. Image by emma-k-alexandra licensed under Creative Commons.
I was in Hawaii for the first time earlier this year. Expecting a sunny beach vacation, it was actually more of a profound learning experience. I was not expecting to be provoked in thought as much as I was. For our purposes, the thing that stayed with me most was the state motto, formerly the …
it's the largest freshwater lake on the planet by surface area, you could lose a couple of smaller countries in there and not even notice. (vs Europe)
on top of that, it's a Northern lake, so the water never really gets warmer than 50 F (10 C) even in the heat of summer, and it's famous for sudden violent storms that destroy ships and buildings alike. this thing has a MASSIVE body count because it's also a major shipping thoroughfare.
She is also over 1,300ft/400m deep at her deepest. Once she has eaten you, she will not give you back. Lake Superior doesn't give up her dead.
And when Bunjy says "the largest by surface are" what that means is: Lake Superior is a whopping 31,700 square miles (82,103 square km) of water. The only reason she is not an inland sea is because she is freshwater.
She has tides. She has rip currents, like an ocean does. You don't even have to go out on a boat to get got by her, all you have to do is step into her icy waters in the wrong spot. She has ice formations that aren't "icebergs" on the technicality that they didn't calve from glaciers, even though they look and act the same.
(photo by Paul Berger)
She LOOKS like an ocean when you are at her shores. This is from a location on the Minnesota side shore.
(photo by George Ilstrup)
She is huge, icy, and hungry. This makes her very dangerous. Not to be fucked around with, because you WILL find out.
The number of dinnertime conversations we've had with our kids about the Ukraine war appears to be directly correlated with their interest in tank warfare and drones...
Ok but seriously: years ago a Muslim friend of mine (cishet male, in case that matters to some of you) actually used the exact same argument as panel five when explaining to me why he thinks that the Muslims (and Christians) who claim that the Quran (Bible) is against homosexuality did not bother to read it.
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