Owned by James Alefantis, Comet has received critical acclaim from The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, New York magazine, the DCist, and Guy Fieri of Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

[1] The original idea for the space was to make a restaurant devoted to roast chicken called "The Hen House", but Alefantis and Greenwood decided against it and made the location a pizzeria instead.

[10] Additionally, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Frank Winstead criticized Alefantis for having placed a ping pong table on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant to attract and entertain customers.

[11] Alefantis held a meeting with the local ANC board to formally request that it allow Comet to place outside seating, have live entertainment in the restaurant, and remain open after midnight.

[22] On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, walked into the restaurant with a semi-automatic rifle and fired three rounds inside the building before being arrested; no one was injured.

[26] Welch died on January 6, 2025, from gunshot wounds sustained after pointing a firearm at a police officer during a traffic stop in Kannapolis, North Carolina.

[28] On Facebook, a local PR consultant set up an event to support the restaurant and nearby businesses affected by the harassment campaign, which thousands of people expressed interest in attending.

[29][30] During the sentencing hearing for the gunman, then-U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson stressed that Welch's actions "literally left psychological wreckage."

The Washington Post's food critic, Tom Sietsema, gave Comet two and a half stars out of four, noting that its pizzas "are as good for their thin and yeasty crusts as for their toppings.

[37] The restaurant also appeared on an episode of Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri in 2010 in which he called the Yalie clam and the Philly calzone pizzas some of the "best he's ever had".

[38][39] GQ ranked James Alefantis as the 49th most powerful person in Washington, partly on the basis of owning Comet Ping Pong and its cultural cachet.

[13][42][43] DCist's Mehan Jayasuriya noted of the venue, "It's not often that, on your way into a punk rock show, you have to carefully skirt around the band members, for fear of interrupting their ping-pong match.