I Don’t Know What You Heard About… P.M.P.

For those of you who scored high on your SATs or have taken in the breathtaking views of Fall Creek Gorge between classes — you already know.

For everyone else, sorry, but this story won’t involve a velvet wide-brimmed hat with a feather, an ivory-handled cane, or any buff dudes hanging upside down doing crunches.

Because a P.M.P. has nothing to do with cats named Dolemite or Fifty Cent.

It has everything to do with Poor Man’s Pizza — more specifically, Ithaca, New York’s legendary Hot Truck version.

Nothing. Beats. A Poor Man's. Pizza.

Toasted Undercarriage

Bob Petrillose — better known as Hot Truck Bob — and his wife Sharon created the Poor Man’s Pizza back in 1960, serving it out of their red-and-white mobile food truck parked on Stewart Avenue in Ithaca, New York.

Rumor has it, Bob originally tried making whole pizzas out of the truck which wasn’t exactly practical. One day, he decided to sauce and cheese some leftover bread, and voilà — the P.M.P. was born.

For the next forty years, Bob pulled that truck up to a gaggle of hungry Cornell students waiting for cheap, late-night eats. The Hot Truck also boasted a lineup of toasty acronyms: the MBC (Meatball & Cheese), the RaRa (roast beef, pepperoni, and melted mozzarella), and more. According to the Cornell Alumni page, a former student named Ira Bernstein (‘75) — who worked shifts on the truck — even created a fun shorthand dictionary of truck lingo. “Grease” meant add mayo. “Garden” meant add lettuce.

Bob eventually sold the truck to the Shortstop Deli, a popular brick-and-mortar hangout in town that started in 1979. They continued running the truck through 2018, until it broke down beyond repair. Today, Shortstop still serves the Hot Truck sandwiches on their homemade rolls — but the P.M.P. continues to be made on Ithaca Bakery French Bread: sauced, cheesed, then baked in that super-hot conveyor-belt oven.

It’s frequently suggested — though never confirmed — that Stouffer’s frozen French bread pizza was inspired by Bob’s cheap treat. Some stories even claim a former truck employee stole the recipe for a quick payday.

But if you ask me, there’s really no comparison. And remember—No Cadillacs, no perms, you can't see— nothing's better than the original P.M.P.

Did anyone else just cringe? I just cringed.

There are a hundred reasons to visit the Finger Lakes — this might just be the best.