I Bought "Stranger Things" Pizza After I Saw an Instagram Ad, and It's the Best Frozen Pizza I’ve Ever Eaten

I’ve lost track of how many times I've thought about eating at a restaurant from a TV show. The diner in Seinfeld, the coffee shop in Friends, and Luke’s Diner from Gilmore Girls all come to mind. And, of course, who could forget the iconic Pizza Planet in Toy Story?

There’s another fictional pizza place that I think about a lot, and that’s Surfer Boy Pizza from Stranger Things. I would love to have pizza delivered by a VW van topped with a surfboard, but for now, I’ll settle for grabbing it in my grocery store’s freezer aisle. That’s right: You can now try Surfer Boy Pizza in real life, thanks to Palermo’s.

The geniuses behind the viral Cheez-It pizza from earlier this year, Palermo’s is no stranger to novelty frozen pizzas. After seeing a ton of Instagram ads about this collab, I decided that I needed to do the valiant and important work of reviewing this pizza.

Is "Stranger Things" Pizza Good?

I'm a frozen pizza connoisseur, so my standards are pretty high. Typically, when making a frozen pizza, I will at a minimum top it with dried oregano, basil, garlic powder, and onion powder. But I did not doctor these pizzas in any way before sampling. I fired up the oven on a Sunday and got ready to watch football and eat pizza all day long.

There are four different flavors:

• Hawkins High Cheese Pizza: mozzarella, provolone, Parmesan, and Romano cheeses
• Hawkins Lab Combination Pizza: Italian sausage, chopped pepperoni, and Hatch chile sauce
• Palace Arcade Pepperoni Pizza: sliced pepperoni and mozzarella cheese
• Starcourt Mall Supreme Pizza: Italian sausage, pepperoni, olives, onion, and peppers

Guess what? None of these pizzas needed any additional herbs or spices to taste good. They were all fantastic. I was genuinely blown away.

The most important part of a frozen pizza is the sauce. If you can’t nail this, you’re toast. The sauce was flavorful, not too thick or too watery, and didn’t spill out the sides as I ate. This crust was also incredible—sturdy, crispy, and not too dry or hard. I was in disbelief that this was frozen pizza.

The quality of ingredients for toppings also impressed me. The sausage wasn’t too chewy, and it was really well-spiced. The pepperoni was easy to bite through and not too salty. 

By far, my favorite pizza of the lot was the Hawkins Lab Combination Pizza. This combined chopped pepperoni, sausage, and Hatch chile peppers. It had a nice kick of heat from the Hatch chiles, but wasn’t overwhelming. The chopped pepperoni gave it a nice flavor and avoided my number one annoyance with sliced pepperoni on a pizza: the dreaded grease pool. This pizza disappeared the fastest out of all of them.

Where To Find Surfer Boy Pizza

Surfer Boy Pizzas appear to be available at plenty of grocery stores and range from $6.99 to $8.99. This isn't a permanent product, and I genuinely don’t know what I’m going to do when these pizzas are gone. They're that good! I guess I’ll have to move to the Upside Down.

_{To learn more about our approach to product recommendations, see HERE.}