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Courteney Cox Responds to the Haters About Her Controversial Pizza Video

Courteney Cox is best known for her role as Monica Gellar on the Manhattan-based sitcom Friends, so it’s no wonder that her Instagram video from December explaining how a “true New Yorker” eats pizza went viral. Although we took her unconventional approach to noshing on a slice as sarcasm, many of her followers did not. Months after receiving hundreds of outraged comments, Cox finally clapped back with another video.

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In the first video, she starts by saying, “So, first, what you do is dab it. You get all the oil off. And then, authentic New Yorkers—they like to cut the tip off, and they just do a little bite at a time. And if you’re from Sicily, roll it like a pizza pie.”

Later on, she gets even more outlandish with her methods. “Sometimes when people are craving double cheese, they scrape all the cheese into one area,” she says, as she moves all of her cheese towards the crust. After this, she tears off the bottom part of the pizza and says, “Then you can give this to somebody,” offering it to another table at the pizzeria. She ends the video by saying, “If you can get it in three bites, that’s when you’re a real New Yorker,” then shoves the whole crust into her mouth.

If you’re from the NYC area, you may be especially offended. (The grease is a crucial part of the pizza-eating experience—dabbing be damned.) But you may also figure that her strategies are so strange that she couldn’t possibly have been serious.

But that didn’t stop hundreds of New York natives and other pizza lovers from roasting her in the comments (“Joey would go nuts,” one IG user wrote) and in their own videos responding to the star’s shenanigans. Cox featured a few of them in a new video, in which she confirms that she was, indeed, kidding.

“So, I’m back in New York, same pizza place where I told people how to eat pizza New York-style,” she says at the start of the video. “I know I offended so many people in the comments—whoa. I just wanna say I’m so sorry, I know how to do it. I was just joking around, okay? I’m really sorry.”

She wasn’t going to sign off without one more tongue-in-cheek joke aimed at the pizza purists. At the end of the video, she asks the cashier for a cauliflower crust pizza. When he says they don’t have any, she replies, “No cauliflower crust? Wow, okay. Yeah, thanks,” and walks away. Good one, Courteney.

Nevertheless, she captioned the video, “You fold it, you eat it. Got it. Just jokin’ around.” Now that’s a method Joey could get behind.


Taryn Pire is PureWow’s associate food editor. A former bartender and barista, she’s been writing about all things delicious since 2016, developing recipes, reviewing restaurants and investigating food trends at Food52, New Jersey Family Magazine and Taste Talks. When she isn’t testing TikTok’s latest viral recipe, she’s having popcorn for dinner and posting about it on Instagram @cookingwithpire.


taryn pire

Food Editor

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  • Studied English and writing at Ithaca College