Approach the door. It’s an unassuming thing, the glass greased with fingerprints, and the times of opening and closing for each day of the week still stubbornly cling to the smudged surface. Perhaps it’s raining (it’s definitely raining), so fat drops run together on that peaked red roof, racing downward to throw themselves from the edge in a sputtering, dirty stream. You grip the handle, and it opens—no one has locked these doors, for there’s nothing inside to protect. The smell of vinyl hits you as you gaze across the empty booths, the small tables grouped together as if still waiting for a Little League team to arrive for their victory party; the darkened salad bar sits just as expectantly, a few lonely sets of tongs left scattered between the gaping holes where basins of iceberg lettuce and cottage cheese once stood ready. From somewhere, a breath of air stirs, and Book-It coupons trail along the floor like little literary tumbleweeds.
You have entered the ghost of a Pizza Hut. Savor the moment as you would a personal pan pizza.
Like a stuffed crust, the closure of hundreds of Pizza Huts after the Covid-19-related bankruptcy filing of its largest franchisee is a lot to take in. But unlike most of the heavy-handed metaphors 2020 doles out, there’s a way to look at this one as both the death of the American dream and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit capitalism. Enter this Daily Beast interview with Mike Neilson, the mind behind the blog Used To Be A Pizza Hut. You see, where a Pizza Hut falls, flowers tend to spring up through the rubble, and by that we mean sex stores and insurance companies tend to take over and attempt to disguise the Once And Former Hut as something less Hut-ish.
“There are so many old Pizza Huts that are turned into something else that there are very few towns in America that don’t seem to have an old Pizza Hut that is now a laundromat or a title loan place or something like that,” Mike Neilson, owner of the blog Used To Be A Pizza Hut, told The Daily Beast. His blog, as well as a popular subreddit, share pictures of repurposed Pizza Huts.
Sometimes tenants in old Pizza Huts try to disguise the building’s past by painting the roof a color other than red, or surgically removing the pyramid-like structure at the top of the place. They’re not fooling anyone, Neilson argued.
The bravest hearts choose not to run from ghosts, instead embracing what once was and making it a part of what will be.
“There’s one in New Jersey that just calls itself ‘Liquor Hut,’” Neilson said. “They were just like, ‘Nope, we’re just going to stick with the Hut. This shape is Hut, everyone knows this is a Hut, we’re just going to sell liquor, and now it’s Liquor Hut.’”
When faced with such a choice, what will you do? Will you paint your red roof a flat brown, as though any color could hide that unforgettable shape? Or will you be a Liquor Hut?
But we can’t all be Liquor Huts. Here, enjoy some more despairing symbolism, courtesy of The Daily Beast:
The new occupants of former Pizza Huts, as documented on Neilson’s blog and the r/FormerPizzaHuts subreddit, often suggest a grim account of recent local ongoings. Among them is an ex-Pizza Hut conducting COVID tests. Pizza Huts-turned-title-loans companies, like this one called CashMoney, are endemic. Yakima County, Washington, temporarily used an abandoned Pizza Hut as a morgue. Psalms Funeral Home in Navasota, Texas, used to be a Pizza Hut, and has the steepled roof to prove it.
So time and the world marches on, Huts becoming something new without relinquishing their grip on the Meat-Loving future that shall never be. But not all hope is lost for the Hut that encompasses all the smaller Huts. While the closure of these 300 locations is, you know, not great, Pizza Hut as a whole (and the pizza industrial complex in general) is holding up A-OK:
Most of the affected Pizza Huts will be dine-in restaurants. Pizza Huts with more limited operations are doing just fine: In May, as COVID-19 swept the nation, Pizza Hut touted its top-performing month for takeout and carry out in eight years, CNBC reported.
So, it’s bad, but not Blockbuster bad, if you know what we mean.
So we eat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, cheese stretching on forever, past the shells of once-crowded dining rooms and into a future of oddly distinctive gentleman’s clubs and pharmacies.
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132 Comments
I haven’t seen an eat in Pizza Hut in at least a decade, if not 2. Just the hybrid take out ones with like Taco Bell or something. Guess kids have no incentives to read anymore. Actually on that note are there still book fairs? Those were great.
I was just thinking the same thing. I haven’t eaten in an actual Pizza Hut since I was kid. Hell, I haven’t eaten their pizza outside of delivery in 5 years and that was at one of their Target kiosks. The only pizza restaurants I’ve actually gone to lately (pre-pandemic) were local joints.
A Pizza Hut was my first waiter job twenty something years ago. I remember when we weighed kids to determine the price of their buffet ticket. I was a waif-thin 16 year old, and it felt so weird when a hefty kid would be mortally embarrassed at the bizarre rule. It was completely nonsensical, anyway – I saw so many skinny kids eat more than half a pizza anyways. Getting a 5 dollar tip at a table was like hitting the jackpot. The standard was 1 or 2 bucks per table of four. A cook cajoling me into silence for discovering him smoking weed out back felt like I was witness to a mob execution; that was really exciting.
Holy shit I had no idea that happened. That would definitely not fly today. Plus the rail thin kids were bottomless pits half the time. Weird. Interesting though.
Oh man I remember those buffets. We had one that was $6.99 and I cleaned them out every time and I was rail thin. No weighing that I ever recalled. I think we were in more enlightened times by then.
As the parent of an elementary student, I can confirm there are still book fairs. (Maybe not this school year though.) They also send home newsprint Scholastic flyers every month.
Not sure where they got off to, but my wife and I both gave our daughter “Book It!” pins that we had in boxes from our childhood stuff.
When you seen an eat it.
What?
He probably meant to say “when you someone eat it.”
Ohhh gotcha.
I think this is a reference to ye olde AV Club’s “when you someone eat it” expression
:’( Like sands through the hourglass…
There is one on I-75 somewhere between Tennessee and Ohio; at least there was as of 4 years ago- we stopped there while driving back from grandma’s. It was like the late 70’s/80’s I remember were preserved in amber, down to the jukebox. Reasonably sure the pizza was that old as well.
One could argue that this weird nostalgia hard-on for shitty corporate businesses going under is not pop culture.
I can confirm that they (at least the extant ones) are still doing “Book It!”
The only Huts around here that seem to have survived is the ones that are delivery or pick-up only. The sit-down in the nearest town closed almost a decade ago and was tore down shortly thereafter…and never even got a delivery replacement.The rest in the area are either delivery only like in my town or combo shops like in the next town (in the other direction) over.
God, travelling to Tamworth or Inverell from my tiny hometown to go the Pizza Hut for its buffet was just peak 90s childhood for me.My dad bought me my first coffee (something my mother was dead set against) – a terrible, machine-extruded Vienna – at the Armidale Pizza Hut when I was 8 or 9, to ward off the chill and existential malaise of being in Armidale.I know their bolognese sauce contained less that 3% actual meat, but by go it was the best thing to have over that gummy, steam-tray fusili.
Pizza Hut: testing the theory that there is no such thing as bad pizza since 1958.
I’m not at the Pizza HutI’m not at the Taco BellI’m not at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
God I always hated that song.Fine reference however.
BONG
If I look up how old that song is now I’m going to be very disappointed
That photo of the shaker of red pepper flakes is exactly how I remember Pizza Hut, where one had to bury your slice of pizza under a mound of pepper flakes and fake Parmesan to give it something approximating a flavor. It was one of those fast foods so distinctly bland its lack of any real taste haunts you the rest of your life. Nonetheless, it’s one of those junk restaurant chains I’ve always had Stockholm Syndrome sentimentality for and old, repurposed Pizza Huts make me weirdly mist up much the same way as an old Hardee’s or a ghostly, forlorn Stuckey’s.
And all this in a world where Dominos still exists.
“Dominos Pizza lives.”
—Pizza Hut, on its deathbed.
That seems preferable to being a nation of now-defunct (funct?) Pizza Huts.
My favorite pho place is in an old Pizza Hut building. They painted the roof but it’s unmistakable. The food is orders of magnitude better.
For more information on the iconic Pizza Hut design, please refer to this exhaustively researched piece, Who Designed the Roof?http://www.dairyriver.com/wordpress/?page_id=172
As pointed out in a reader’s comment in the article you linked, a traditional Pizza Hut’s rooflines resemble the distinctive design of a Javanese joglo:#sometimesitsjustborrowingnotappropriationbutgivecreditwhereitsdue
Is that the one on Dempster? I’ve been meaning to try that place if so.-d
Is it Pho King good?
Pho King A it is.
Do they serve Creamofsumyunguy?
Sofa King good, even.
pho sho
Richfield…?
I’m in Spokane, WA.
Viet Village in Ft. Myers?
Loved Pizza Hut when I was a kid in the 80s. They always had a couple tabletop video games up front. A couple slices, greasy joysticks, and all the mtn dew a 10 year old could drink. It was xanadu.
That green carpet . . .
Our Pizza Hut had a Street Fighter 2 box with a glitchy screen that had to have been as profitable as the pizza. It was like a busy dive bar’s sole pool table – some kid was always on it, waiting for challengers. It died, and sat there unused for years – I got a job there at 16 and by then it was like an archaeological relic that teens agreed used to be a thriving corner, in the dark ages of three or four years before.
I feel the pizza was very very different back then as well. I have vivid memories of the breadsticks being like crispy golden focaccia almost, with a crust on the pan pizza that matched it. Eating it later in life (late 90s) it was nothing like memories.
Yeah, I think the recipes and ingredients probably changed – we’d go there for lunch in the summertime when I was a kid (the individual pizzas were the right size for us) and everyone thought it was good. That said, if we were ordering a pizza for dinner we’d usually go to a local place we liked.
They had a Pizza Hut Express on campus at UIC in the mid 90’s, and I’d get an individual pizza there once in a while – it was definitely different by then. Haven’t been back since, I think (the fact that our local Hut closed years ago doesn’t help. Oddly the building is still there, operating as a Mexican restaurant, and is obviously an old Hut).
yep!
They used to deep fry their crusts. You could literally squeeze grease out of crust end like a sponge. It was fucking glorious.
Ahhhhh that would explain it. I could see that making a giant difference.
Yeah, I always think of those games when I drive by a Pizza Hut. The one I went to as a kid in the 80s had Ms. Pacman and Popeye. I remember warm, cozy decor and big, red, translucent plastic cups. The only other chain in that town was Pizza Inn.Haven’t been in one in decades and don’t plan on it ever happening again. I’m not sure how there are any remaining in my city, with all the quality local places.
The small town near where I live couldn’t even sustain a McDonald’s, yet somehow it still maintains an incredibly sad-looking full service Pizza Hut. It always seems dark inside when I drive by, even though it is open. Kind of like those sleazy little gambling dens or “date bars” that you find in shadier sections of European cities.
There’s a Round Table Pizza around here that just recently went out of business. They still had Golden Axe and Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition and they’re completely operational when I went in last year.
I missed the tabletop era, but the early-90s Huts in my town still had a rock-solid arcade offering, including the awesome Alien vs Predator arcade beat-em-up
It was my family’s regular weekend dine-out spot in the early-to-mid 90s. They had Mortal Kombat! For a while they also had Kabuki Clash, which I never saw at any arcades and in ‘95-96 I thought it was one of the best-looking fighting games out there! This tiny girl with a huge axe was my favorite:
I’ve seen a similar thing to the “Liquor Hut” with a defunct Hollywood Video, which is now “Hollywood Wine & Spirits” (although the building is not a distinctive shape like a Pizza Hut). At first they just took the “Video” part off the sign and replaced it with “Wine & Spirits”, but eventually they put up a much more boring and not copyright infringing sign that just makes you wonder why there’s a liquor store in the middle of Rochester, NY with “Hollywood” in its name.
There is a “Blockbuster Laundromat” near me that I’m sure has a similar tale.
We have a “Blockbuster Only-Lacrosse-Gear” store. Cracks me up every time I see it.
In California the Safeway supermarket brand is Von’s. There is also a discount supermarket chain called Jon’s. They use the same font. Guess what a lot of their locations used to be.
It depends where in Cali you are. SoCal (where I grew up), it’s Vons, but up here in NorCal, it’s Safeway.
Across from our nearest Pizza Hut is a place called Pizza Bank which appropriated a 70s/80s vintage bank building.
Our Hollywood Video went even cheaper on the signage to, Hollywood Liquors.
I used to occasionally go to the lunch buffet at our local, small-town Pizza Hut — but a year or two ago, they closed the stand-alone restaurant and replaced it with a storefront, delivery-and-takeout-only location on a busier street. Somewhat ironically, about six months later, our local Domino’s closed its long-time building and moved into a new one, built from scratch — and while no one would mistake it for a real sit-down restaurant, it does have two tables in the lobby, and so you actually could sit down and eat your pizza there if you wanted to.
“You see, where a Pizza Hut falls, flowers tend to spring up through the rubble”
Came here to post this, thank you for beating me to it.
I’m 46 and Pizza Hut was a TREAT growing up. Right alongside trips to Children’s Palace.
Children’s Palace. That takes me back. Even as a kid growing up before Toys R Us took over, I knew how disorganized a dump they were. Still convinced that there was no rhyme or reason to where stuff was placed. If there was an empty shelf, put that latest shipment of Transformers there, right next to the soccer balls. Crazy the stuff you remember from when you were 8-9 years old.
If I could eat myself to death I would.
In 2006, under the much wiser and humane President George W. Bush, I visited Sunnyvale, CA, and stayed at an unremarkable but quite serviceable two-story hotel along the El Camino Royal, which is a simply ludicrously long four-lane city street composed of nothing but 90-degree intersections at mechanically precise distances all equipped with stoplights, lined with things like small strip malls, big box retailers, car dealerships, hotels and restaurants and the odd supermarket or residential building here and there stretching all the way from San Fransisco to the Gulf of Mexico roughly. Or well, that’s what it felt like anyway.Some blocks down this (really, really boring) street from where I stayed there was a Pizza Hut “restaurant”. It was old, crummy and worn, the whole premise was grubby and unclean on the inside, and the staff were two or three disinterested guys speaking spanish to each other, while a Mexican music radio channel poured out of some speaker out back at a fairly loud volume.I still ate lunch there, because I considered it something you just have to do when visiting the United States. Eat factory-made pepperoni deep-pan pizza, if only just once.I did skip eating at Taco Bell though; the “food” they served was just too fucking gross-looking.
My local video store (yes, you read that correctly) recently downsized to make room for a Pizza Hut that opened last week.
The video store I get, but why would anyone open a Pizza Hut in 2020? And why the hell is it so big that the video store had to downsize?
The video store gave up their game section which was in a side room. We had a normal Pizza Hut (hut shaped building) which I can only assume is shutting down. The new Pizza Hut that just opened is really tiny so I’m assuming it is for delivery only.
Hopefully in 6 months when the Pizza Hut shuts down the games can return.
Honestly, I’m kind of a Jay Gatsby and my green light is that red Pizza Hut roof and the nostalgia for the days of my youth when the Hut was great.
The nearest Pizza Hut to us moved to a new location nearby. What’s great is that move freed up the building to be taken over by a local Mexican restaurant that was displaced thanks to a giant subdivision/retail/office eyesore that’s going up where they’d been for years.
Does Mike Neilson host a show that makes fun of bad movies, by any chance?
Ah, yes, with Tim Servo and Crom.
I have never actually lived near a pizza hut. I’ve been to them, sure, but I’ve been out of their delivery range for all but one year of my life. That one year, I was in a dorm in law school – but when I moved to an apartment literally across the street, they would no longer deliver to me.
Just like that Seinfeld episode?
Not a Pizza Hut per se, but in my home town, an International House of Pancakes closed when I was very young, and the place then saw a succession of business move in and out, including several Thai restaurants, before it burned down a few years back. Needless to say, we all called it “ThaiHop.”
An ex girlfriend’s hometown had a Mexican restaurant that was previously a Dairy Queen. Everyone referred to it as “Casa de Q”.
An IHOP in my town was converted into a local buffet, and it wasn’t half-bad!
This article is like one of those recipes that starts with a 700-word origin story and also the recipe is terrible.
I looked up the one down the street from my house growing up. Its a sushi bar now. Still looks more or less the same outside.
I can’t recall the last time I ate at Pizza Hut of my own free will. In fact, the last time I can remember ever eating Pizza Hut at all was when my parents ordered carry out when I had family visiting, and my main memory was of profound disappointment that, of all the options available, Pizza Hut was the choice they went with.
There was (a now defunct itself) fast food chain in Wisconsin called “Red Baron”. It started in former Red Barn (a defunct 1970s chain) locations as it only needed to add an O. I always thought that was clever.
For no connected reason other than it’s WI-related, I am really wanting a pizza from Glass Nickel right now.I don’t think they deliver to upstate NY.
Well now I want some Glass Nickel Pizza too! Place was always only thing left open when I was doing stuff super late.
Also Wisconsin related, stay away from George Webb’s!
Growing up in the 80s, we were always a Dominos family, so Pizza Hut felt somehow like a taboo. That sauce, just a littler sharper and more tangy than Dominos, that weird crust that felt like it had been soaked in grease for three weeks before baking, to the point where you couldn’t really call it bread anymore. It was all just a little, you know, edgy and dangerous. Memories, man. Don’t you dare get me started on the Ol’ Spaghetti Factory.
Spaghetti Factory still exists!
Oh the grease, theres an argument that pizza hut pizzas are not actually baked but fried
If you smell vinyl entering a Pizza Hut it’s probably the cheese they use.
I worked at a Pizza Hut while I was home from college. One of the other drivers was a burnt-out ex-hippie who you could tell did a little too much acid. One day he came in even more depressed than usual and announced that Jerry Garcia had died and that he didn’t know how he was going to get over this. One of the assistant managers was a young girl whose boyfriend used to show up drunk to pick her up at closing time and once passed out in the parking lot.
Is it just me, or did those Pizza Hut restaurants in the 80s, if not fine dining, at least feel like several steps above fast food? Everything seemed to get greasier and dirtier once they combined them with the other Yum! brands or tried to transition into a wing restaurant.
You might be right about that…I remember going to Pizza Hut with the family and sitting down to eat some pizza and a trip to the salad bar, fond memories of Pizza Hut but once my family stopped going pizza from Pizza Hut became a distant memory. I remember eating many an anchovies and cheese pizza growing up, along with the favorites like pepperoni and and a supreme pizza.Eating a pizza served to you at a table in a restaurant vs eating in a lazy boy chair in front of your tv is under-rated, but once my family moved on we would only eat the occasional pizza together in a restaurant setting.
The Pizza Hut I went to as a kid in the early 80’s was very much like how Italian restaurants looked in Seventies movies: checkered tablecloths, islands of light in darkness, faux stained glass everywhere, bushy potted plants, bentwood chairs, red vests on the waitstaff. The pizza was actually pretty yummy for a kid – hot, heaped with toppings, slathered in mozzarella over a salty sauce, that superbuttery, crackly crust that seems to have completely gone extinct decades ago. Plus this location had an amazing run of head-to-head sitdown video game machines that not even the local arcades could boast. Now I’ve become a nitpicky, judgemental pizza eater, but I’ve always carried a fondness for places with a spaghetti-and-meatballs vibe and a cheesy, doughy, matronly pie.
Yeah this matches my memory. Going to Pizza Hut with the family was treated as a … treat, growing up. But have you had their pizza anytime in the past 20 years? Fully went down to tube. Not that the pizza itself was ever exceptional, but whatever it was, it was good. Now, not so much. And you described the crust perfectly.
You can still get the crust like that but it’s no longer the default, you have to order a “pan pizza” which costs more, of course.
When I was a kid, Pizza Hut was a family night out that we always looked forward to. I remember the pizza actually being good, and I’m from NYC, so it’s not like I grew up in a pizza desert. There was one Friday night in the mid-90s where we went there and it was just awful. It was like they had changed all the ingredients and their proportions overnight. We ate there one other time and it was the same thing. I still remember how gross those meals were all these years later. I’ve had like highway rest stop takeout Pizza Hut in the years since, and I sat down and ate in a Stockholm Pizza Hut once for the novelty, but otherwise haven’t been back since. I’ve been operating under the assumption it never stopped being gross, because I would have heard otherwise if they improved.
From what I recall, the quality started downhill when they went from being just sit down and take out, to delivery also. I am sure things they did to the pizza making process to speed up the works to function in a “this was still when Dominoes guaranteed delivery in 30 mins or less” pizza delivery world was the cause of the downward turn of food quality.
About the Stockholm Pizza Hut. Is the sit down Hut a thing there? I’ve seen them in South America where they are all fast food.
In most of Europe, Pizza Hut is more of a sit-down restaurant — not fine dining, but significantly more upscale than the U.S. version.
Is the pizza any different? I remember when I was a kid ordering Domino’s in Mexico and not liking it. Now I want to try Domino’s wherever I see it around the world but recognize that I can’t really do it. I once was at an apartment in Spain with a Domino’s magnet on the fridge and I was soooo tempted to call. I think I went out and got Doner Kabap instead.
I never thought of them that way. Always considered Pizza Hut to be, at best, McDonald’s-level food.
It was better than fast food, particularly with the salad bar. Also the Personal Pan Pizza was the ultimate at the time, because it meant you didn’t have to compromise on toppings.
Yes!!!! Pizza Hut was amazing back in the 80’s, and even up through the mid to late 90’s. I’m not sure when Yum Brands bought them out, but around the turn of the century, they took a nose dive they’ve never recovered from. We have a local pizza chain that has the same vibe I remember from Pizza Hut, quality pizza, people on dates, families and groups of friends celebrating a special occasions with a pie and a pitcher. I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting the owners knew they could fill a void left by Pizza Hut.
That was definitely a family thing for us in the early 90s, before our local pizza chain spent a LOT of money on a nice parlor that pretty much ripped out Pizza Hut’s parlor business in the city. I think there’s only one dine-in PH left in our city, and it certainly does a fraction in dine-in business as the GORGEOUS two-story waterfront pizza parlor does here in Oxnard, CA (pictured below)Fun fact: This is the same chain where this happened, next city over in Camarillo, CA
I was a kid in the 90’s and they always posited themselves that way but the food wasn’t very good. I didn’t understand why they were popular, so “coasting on the goodwill from last decade” definitely tracks
when i was a kid i guess the difference between a restaurant and fast food was a drive thru and/or a play area. but growing up pizza hut was always THE SHIT cause the food was good and they had a kickass arcade room without about 8-10 machines. i remember they had pit fighter, hard drivin’, offroad, a nintendo multigame, bad dudes etc, but they got rid of them in the early/mid-90’s.
Maybe. The 80s were a time of growth for those fast casual chains…they have been declining pretty steadily from the 2000s on. The rise of the Food Network in the 90s and more shows highlighting local food stops has driven americans one of 2 ways. Upmarket or down. Part of it is also economics. The middle class judges itself by each other. Going to a Fridays or Pizza Hutt or Chilis…is something you do after work if you are in a dead end office job or work retail or something and need to grab a drink and something to eat at like 11 at night (well not so much Pizza Hutt). The Fridays near me used to get a ton of 20somethings 20 years ago. Now…that thing is struggling. Rather than go to fridays or anything like that…ill go to a local place. Pizza Hutt did seem to get dragged down market, but it also had to introduce delivery and easier takeout to compete with Dominos and Papa Johns. Its hard for me to gauge, i live in NJ and while we have pizza hutts and dominos….we have so many mom and pop pizzaerias its not a fair comparison, you trip over them. So people are eitehr going to get something as cheap as possible, or they go up market. Its playing out in pretty much every industry. People can say its the internet…and yeah, that is killing retail shopping…but JC Penny, Sears, Macys…these were staples of teh american middle class, and they have been decimated over the past 20 years. Their demographic either goes to Target or old navy for cheap clothes, or goes to banana republic/jcrew etc the middle is just evaporating….the old higher end are now taking their place (particularly with the emergence of the “Factory Store”) not that I havent ranted long enough, but its all symptomatic of the hollowing out of our working and middle class…the carnage is creeping higher and its destroying retail food, retail shopping, people shop online because its convienent, but also….its just as cheap. Im grossly oversimplifying but the kernel is there.
They used to be quite decent, I to have fond memories of going to the red roof Pizza Hut’s as a kid. While I can’t speak for the way it used to be done, I did work for a Pizza Hut here about 10 or 12 years ago, god can’t believe it’s been that long. and while it has been a while I can almost promise you the pizza’s are made the same now. I think the reason they seem to be greasier now is because of how they are made. See the thing is NONE of the dough is fresh, they are shipped as frozen disks of dough. You then spray the sheet, for hand tossed LOL, with their off brand pam to coat it throw the frozen disk on the sheet cover and put in walk in cooler where it thaws and “rises” (maybe by a 1/8 of an inch) over night. Pan Pizza also come frozen and you squirt 3 pumps of oil in a pan put in frozen disk cover and toss in cooler over night. So ALL The dough is just sitting in oil and or cooking spray for 12 to 18 hours.
They must have switched to the frozen pan dough right after I stopped working there. When I started in ‘03 my first gig was actually mixing and portioning the pan dough in the morning, all the other crust-types were frozen. I worked there until ‘08 or so and it was still fresh made when I left (but I could tell in the ensuing years they had switched to frozen because of the way the crust looks after cooking).
I feel like that was generally true of a lot of restaurants. I can’t remember the last time I went to a Chinese restaurant for a sit down meal, but we do take-out once a week, but that was a regular part of my childhood.
The 80s and 90s were the heyday of family dining. We would often go to fast food or franchise restaurants for a sit down family meal, but I don’t think people do that as much anymore. I have a family of my own and I definitely don’t take them out for meals like that.
Pizza Hut was the bomb in the 80s. The pizza was good, the sticks were amazing. Was it the greatest? Heck no, but for the $ it was pretty darn good. A pizza hut birthday party was a mark of wealth and power.The delivery game and heavy competition from Dominoes forced them to go super cheap on ingredients. The early 90s weren’t too bad, and they did some creative things. After that, as they continued to lower costs, the quality got worse and worse. Pizza Hut and Dominoes made it a race to the bottom without even considering that LC would beat them there. Now all three suck, but LC is the cheapest.
When I started working at Pizza Hut in 2003, my first gig was coming in early to mix up the dough for the Pan pizzas. Ran the big mixer, portioned it and pressed it through a machine, then left it to rise in the warmer. The thin crust and (ironically) the hand-tossed dough were both frozen discs delivered in boxes. I’m guessing years before that, the hand-tossed dough was probably actually made on site also. A few years later, they switched to frozen discs for the Pan pizza also. I still enjoy a Pan pizza every now and then, but there is definitely a noticeable difference in quality since they switched to the frozen discs.
Pizza Hut in the 70s and 80s was actually decent when they were sit down restaurants. They went downhill when they focused on carryout and delivery to compete with Dominos.
There’s another former Pizza Hut in NJ (Rockaway) that is now a diner…the ‘Red Hut Diner’. Another two abandoned businesses that are always recognizable for what they formerly were…IHOPs, with their light blue roof…and Howard Johnsons, with their orange and light blue theme. LOTS of both of those around New Jersey (one IHOP on rt 46 in…um…Wayne-ish?…became an AT&T store, so the color sort of worked).
Pizza Hut sucks. It’s for people in their teens and twenties who have yet to develop adult taste buds. Go to a real pizza place. Fuck, go to a gas station.
Shout out to my local Pizza Hut in Crofton MD. The pizza is great,and the deals are are good. And they have great chicken wings – which I never expected from a Pizza Hut. And the delivery guys are cool too – very COVID sanitation aware. I hope they survive as a carry out delivery business.
Shout out to my local Pizza Hut in Crofton MD. The pizza is great,and the deals are are good. And they have great chicken wings – which I never expected from a Pizza Hut. And the delivery guys are cool too – very COVID sanitation aware. I hope they survive as a carry out delivery business.
There’s a Pizza Hut which does pick-ups and deliveries about five minutes from my house but I don’t think I’ve eaten anything from there in at least 15 years. I used to love the dine-in place with the pasta, salad bar and all that but we haven’t had one in my city for the better part of 20 years. Last time I went there was like a week after 9/11.
Pizza Hut in my town closed when I was 10. The building remained unoccupied for like 7 years. Then, a Mexican restaurant took over the building. Now, we have a new Pizza Hut in a small mini-mall in front of Walmart.
I once got sick after eating at a sushi joint housed in an old IHOP in suburban St. Louis about 25 years ago. Not so good times.
There’s one near my work that the owners turned in to… another pizza restaurant. And the interior is exactly the same as a Pizza Hut from the 90s… by which I mean the lighting is awful and the walls could probably use a fresh coat of paint. And it’s called Pizza House. It’s audacious in how little of a shit the owners give. But God damn they make some good pizza there, which is I guess how they get away with the awful aesthetic.
Last ate a Pizza Hut in Grand Island, Nebraska seven years ago. Was traveling to Colorado with my wife and six kids. Don’t recall anything about the pizza but my wife and I were ecstatic that they had beer. The waitress was a bit surly but I tip big so I’m pretty sure she remembers me.
I know it’s not Hut, but it is related: I love looking at the Chicago law office using an old Taco Bell location on Cicero Ave.
Were you going for the Talking Heads line about Pizza Huts, or was it a happy accident?
In the 7os and 80s it was “used to be a Dairy Queen.” When Wal-Mart came we then had “used to be a town.”
Both my wife and I grew up with Pizza Hut back in the days when it was sit-down with pasta and salad courses.She still insists on Pizza Hut when we go for pizza (and only the Supreme) and gets slightly irritated when I choose something else every now and then.
Oddly enough, Pizza Hut in Germany is remarkably popular, I’ve always been taken aback by it. Sold under an “American style pizza” ideal, it has a fanbase, more than once I have seen a line out the door of people waiting for a table, and many locations recommend reservations at known busy times. Reservations at a Pizza Hut! Definitely seemed to be better quality food than what I’ve experienced locally (although I haven’t tried it here in maybe 10 years) too, and the interior/seating quality was definitely better.We didn’t have a PH in the town where I spent much of my childhood, when we moved to a larger town that had one, it seemed alien – I was a fan of the breadsticks and thin crust pizza. Good memories of “Book It” and at least one school function.
Mostly as Mexican restaurants, from what I’ve seen.
I know I’m late to the party but what has to be a former Hut in my town is now a dentist’s office. I can only imagine it’s an improvement.
How will people get sick from all of the oil AND grease AND milk fat Pizza Hut uses to make pizzas? I went to Pizza Hut a lot in 1990 to get the Rocketeer collectible cups, and got sick every time, but never made the connection. Their pizzas are literally oven fried.
This is what happens when you allow white Midwestern conservatives to commercialize ethnic cuisine. It’s either cheap and greasy (Little Caesar’s), not as cheap and greasy (Pizza Hut), or so shitty that it has to be publicly addressed in the advertising (Domino’s).
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