Taylor Swift who? Scoring Fellini's Thanksgiving pizza is like winning the lottery. Here's why.

If you thought snagging Taylor Swift tickets was tough, try getting your hands on this slice of pizza.

Before you raise your eyebrows, know that this isn’t just any pizza. This is Fellini Pizzeria pizza on the day before Thanksgiving.

That’s when throngs of pizza lovers swarm the doors of the Wickenden Street joint for their chance at gobbling up a slice of its famous Thanksgiving pies. It’s a base of lightly baked whole wheat crust topped with mozzarella cheese, mashed potato, turkey, stuffing, gravy, and, if the diner chooses, a dollop of jellied cranberry sauce.

How did the Thanksgiving pizza at Fellini get its start?

It all began about a decade ago.

“How it started was I had leftovers at my house from Thanksgiving, and I brought all my leftovers in and made the staff a leftover pizza, and it was incredible,” said Fellini’s owner, Kristy Knoedler. “So we’re like, all right, we’ve gotta do this, and we did it the following year.”

If that sounds appetizing, good luck getting a reserved pie. What started with 20 to 30 pies has now grown to roughly 2,000 this year as demand has surged.

“Every year it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now we’re pretty much maxed out for the space we have and the amount of oven space to cook as many as we can,” Knoedler said. “We get a lot of upset people, because they can’t get the time slot in, but we do our best.”

How to score a Thanksgiving pizza

Sports reporter Eric Rueb had been trying to score a reservation for us since last year, when the phone lines went down. This year, he finally got one on the first day of fall. Fellini, which has a second location in Cranston’s Pawtuxet Village where it also offers the pies, usually runs out of reservations the same day it begins taking them. And customers can’t beat the rush online. Miss a chance to reserve a pie, and you’ll have to stand outside in line for a slice. Wait times were running upwards of an hour just after noon.

“It’s like a hotline,” Knoedler said. “People try and call us. It’s like winning something on the radio back in the day. You try and call and it’s busy, busy, busy. We have people calling for hours sometimes. It’s very frustrating for them, but it makes it more fun, I think.”

Rueb finally landed a spot by coming to the shop in person.

“When I walked in here, the phone did not stop ringing. … It was unbelievable,” he said.

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Bruce Kane, an administrator at Brown University, said he spent 2½ hours calling just to order five of the pizzas, which for him, has become a tradition.

“One slice is like a whole Thanksgiving meal,” Kane said.

Rueb and I were there trying the slices for the first time, and his two little ones in tow appeared to approve of the offbeat bite.

So what’s all the fuss about?

“I get it now,” Rueb said, after polishing off a slice.

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This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Providence's Fellini Thanksgiving pizza is hard to get, but worth it