The Lazy Dinner Ryan Reynolds Loves Making at Home

He has played a superhero twice, built and sold a gin company for hundreds of millions of dollars, and is by most accounts one of the busiest people in Hollywood. But ask Ryan Reynolds what he actually wants to eat at the end of a long day, and the answer is almost embarrassingly simple.

It is pizza. It has always been pizza.

A Man Who Knows His Limits

Reynolds is remarkably self-aware about his relationship with the kitchen. He told Men’s Health in an interview that he is “not innovative in the kitchen,” adding with his trademark deadpan that if he cooks, “you’ll have a structure fire. The firemen will kick down our door, take my wife away, and give her a better life.”

Blake Lively is, by all accounts, the serious cook in the household. Reynolds is the one who makes pizza.

The Home Ritual That Stuck

In 2022, Reynolds hosted David Letterman at his home for Netflix’s ‘My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,’ and the centrepiece of the whole thing was a homemade brick oven pizza. When Letterman asked whether he would have been cooking if the cameras were not there, Reynolds admitted immediately that no, Blake normally runs the kitchen.

But the pizza oven is his. He revealed that his daughters love carrying the pizza across to the oven, and that they drop roughly half of them in the process, which their dog Boots, lovingly nicknamed the Miracle Vacuum Cleaner, takes full advantage of.

The Pizza Place That Changed Everything

When Reynolds is not firing up the brick oven himself, he has a very specific destination in mind. He told Men’s Health that Patsy’s Pizza in Harlem is “pretty much the best pizza on the whole planet,” asking rhetorically, “Is it really unhealthy if it makes you so happy?”

He also has a regular pizza spot in the East Village where the staff are entirely convinced he is Ben Affleck. He told the ‘Dear Hank and John’ podcast that he has been going there for years, they ask how J.Lo is doing, and he just says “great” and takes his pizza.

Clean Eating With One Glorious Exception

Between roles, Reynolds follows a disciplined routine of clean whole foods every few hours, including oatmeal, sweet potato, protein, and brown rice, guided by trainer Don Saladino. He freely admits it is not glamorous eating.

The pizza is the exception, the reward, and by his own description, the moment when none of the structure matters at all. It started with his very first TV role on a show literally called ‘Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place,’ and it clearly never left.