Makin' it Great

December 29, 2023 9:18 AM

The Retrologist's Guide to Pizza Hut Classics

Extra toppings: 'Putt Putt to the Pizza Hut,' a 1965 commercial; 'Good Things,' a 1977 ad; 1988 'The Land Before Time'; 1989 'Solar Shades'; 'The Pizza Head Show' (1993-7).

(In other Pizza Hut news, two large California franchisees will lay off over 1,100 delivery drivers, blaming it on an upcoming minimum wage increase.)

posted by box (21 comments total)

I saw this article the other day and discovered there was a Pizza Hut Classic just 40 minutes down the road from us. My wife was off work, so we decided to pretend to play hooky and took a road trip for lunch. While there was no salad bar and they didn't have the red cups, we did get to have a pan pizza fresh out of the pan underneath the glow of a Tiffany-style Pizza Hut light as a TV played Tom & Jerry cartoons next to us. We were also the only people in the place, and had unbelievably good service. 10/10, would Hut again.
posted by eschatfische at 9:37 AM on December 29, 2023 [9 favorites]

The old look is certainly nostalgic. Apparently they're still doing the bookit program? I got a couple of those little 4-slice pizzas out of that deal as a kid.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 9:41 AM on December 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh this briefly gave me hope but noooo my childhood pizza hut, home of that sweet sweet bookit personal pan pizza, has been desecrated. The roof! The roof! The roof has been ruined

Time travel via google maps streetview. Yeah I know about the "more dates" thing now but click a bit down the road then come back slowly, imagining my growing despair as I realize that my cherished, vaguely-remembered Pizza Hut doesn't seem to exist anymore. Then a flash of joy, there it is! Click once more, back to sadness.

It was in that very Hut that my dad told me Dr. Pepper was a spicy hot soda, so I probably wouldn't like it. Then he said that red pepper flakes were not spicy & I could try some. I did. They were spicy.

Still believed him about Dr. Pepper for quite a while...
posted by Baethan at 10:21 AM on December 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you ever find yourself in Norton, Kansas (for some unfathomable reason) be sure to stop in to the nastiest PH in America. Complete with the original 70s carpet, uncleaned since it was new. And, to top-off the experience, a cold bottle of 3.2 beer.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:36 AM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I was in middle and high school, I remember Pizza Hut as being the high quality option in town, versus the small and dank local place with what even then was obviously not very good pizza. The most recent time I ate at a Pizza Hut was about 10 years ago, and it was terrible. What I don't know is if it was just as terrible back when I was young but my standards were lower, or if it declined in those years. But it was bad enough that I haven't felt the need to try again since then.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:52 AM on December 29, 2023

Yeah, I don't think I can imagine a worse pizza than a Pizza Hut pizza, but I still enjoyed the article and the pictures. And the pizza in the article looks pretty good. I wonder if they make a different pizza in the "classic" franchises?
posted by mumimor at 11:16 AM on December 29, 2023

I grew up in Chicago, and there were a dozen good mom 'n' pop pizza places around (no, not everyone eats deep dish in Chicago, and in fact I rarely ever had it as a kid), so my family never did Pizza Hut. But I remember being taken to a Pizza Hut by a friend's family, probably 1978. It was a sit-down experience with a menu, and I remember thinking the pizza was pretty good, at least similar enough to the kinds of pizza I knew. I also remember the Coke in pitchers, the red textured plastic cups and the weird slushy ice. And the video games.

Maybe 25 years later I had Pizza Hut for some dumb reason and it was completely, diametrically different. I'm not saying '70s Pizza Hut was top-quality, but it was at least good enough.
posted by SoberHighland at 11:16 AM on December 29, 2023

I also grew up where Pizza Hut was the classy place for pizza in town. It was always a treat to go as a kid. There's an original one here in Toledo, still, and I keep trying to get my wife to go. After what happened to my beloved Friendly's I don't think I want to wait much longer.
posted by charred husk at 11:38 AM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

As has been noted here previously, the bones of a Pizza Hut live on. There's also r/FormerPizzaHuts.
posted by cupcakeninja at 11:53 AM on December 29, 2023

Pizza Hut was great, but we only ever went there as a treat.

If we just wanted take out, there was the local [YOUR TOWN] House of Pizza. And if we wanted to go somewhere and eat pizza (or have a pizza-themed birthday or end-of-season soccer party) there was Papa Gino's. It was only when we wanted to go somewhere and eat pizza with table service that we went to Pizza Hut.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:32 PM on December 29, 2023

When I was in High School, back in the early 80s, a group of us worked at the University downtown on Wednesdays, instead of going to class. I remember when they came out with Personal Pan Pizzas. We'd get there right at 11:00, before anyone else, order, and get our pizzas in something like 45 seconds. It was awesome!
The last time I tried ordering pizza from the Hut, I went to go pick it up when it was supposed to be ready. After waiting there for 20 minutes, I just got my money back, and went to Whataburger.
posted by Spike Glee at 12:37 PM on December 29, 2023

Yeah, I don't think I can imagine a worse pizza than a Pizza Hut pizza…

Pizza King.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:39 PM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pizza Hut Training Video 1988. (FFP)
posted by clavdivs at 12:49 PM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember Pizza Hut in South Florida in the 80s and 90s as being really quite good. Pan Supreme Pizza. Bread sticks or whatever they called them dipped in sauce. They also made a decent panini-like grilled sandwich. We went there often and it was always a nice treat. Though we found even better pizza at owner/operator places like Sebastiano's in Hollywood, FL. God those garlic knots drowned in olive oil. (Sadly they are closed permanently now, I just had to check. Sorry, locals.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:51 PM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Somewhere out on the plains is Chainsville, where you can still visit an Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips right across the street from the Ground Round where they still have peanut shells all over the floor. Roy Rogers is still a going concern there. When you're done with your meal you can stay at the HoJo's or the Motel 6, and if you ask the manager on certain nights, or when he's drunk, he can give you the keys to the little door at the end of the fluorescent-lit hall and you can take the stairs down, hands clammy on the powder-coated metal railings, down into the nearly empty subterranean food court which riddles the earth beneath the town like an immense termite colony. Level upon level, terracotta tile floors, pastel plastic stools and tables bolted to the substrate, rimmed with the neon Taco Bells and Sbarros of your youth, staffed by unhealthy-looking teens, uniform visors shading their eyes from the artificial light, a shambling form pushing a mop and bucket, bathrooms damp and clean and terrifyingly cold, until one night when the frost cracks hard and the entire town folds in on itself, into the vast gaping maw of the unfathomable collapsed food court, the flickering tube lights going out one by one, and the only sound in the crystalizing air is a soft piped-in song, once popular, and now utterly forgotten
posted by phooky at 1:21 PM on December 29, 2023 [18 favorites]

The beginning of the end for Pizza Hut was probably in the late 90s when it was spun off from PepsiCo to be part of the fast foot conglomerate Yum!, which also included KFC and Taco Bell.

• Around 1994 when I was living in San Salvador, Pizza Hut was the one "splurge" restaurant my expat friends and I would often go to when we were feeling even remotely homesick. It was very expensive compared to other restaurants in the area, you got the same pan pizza you would anywhere in the states and everything else was exactly the same.
• Recently I found this amazing Pizza Hut beer mug in a box of stuff my dad packed away from a move in the late 80s. I throw the mug in the freezer a few hours before getting pizza at home and I swear it tastes twice as good!

posted by jeremias at 1:39 PM on December 29, 2023

We were also the only people in the place, and had unbelievably good service. 10/10, would Hut again.

Growing up in Kansas, Pizza Hut dine-in was not a bad place, maybe a bit dark with weird chandoliers, but not bad. In the past decade, every Pizza Hut I've ever stepped in is a disaster zone. Booth fabric with tears, missing tables, broken down and half torn apart arcade machines, and a staff that seems confused if someone shows up wanting to dine-in (fair, I suppose).

The beginning of the end for Pizza Hut was probably in the late 90s when it was spun off from PepsiCo to be part of the fast foot conglomerate Yum!, which also included KFC and Taco Bell.

Competition in the 90's and 00's pizza oven business really heated up, with Papa John's IPOing in 1993 and the dominos . This graph always amuses me: there were points in time where if you bought and held dominos for over a decade, it would have outperformed Google. Same story with Papa Johns but the end results seem less dramatic. Both of these places focuses on high speed pizza delivery. Google maps shows none of the Pizza Huts near me list dine-in options, probably done in by COVID.

So are those franchisees laying off their drivers, are they going to carryout and Uber only?
posted by pwnguin at 2:31 PM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I don't think I can imagine a worse pizza than a Pizza Hut pizza… hmmm

Let me introduce you to a technology company called domino's. Unforgivable.

Pizza Hut can still be decent at "a good location" but domino's is always domino's and even if it's good it's still domino's
posted by chasles at 5:26 PM on December 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

There are several people here who did not have the opportunity to properly appreciate Pizza Hut pretzel crust and it shows and I pity you

and also me. I pity me, all the time, because it's gone and apparently never coming back.

Is it better to have tasted, and lost, than to have never tasted at all?
posted by Baethan at 6:32 PM on December 29, 2023

So are those franchisees laying off their drivers, are they going to carryout and Uber only?

Good question. I wonder what the mix is between Doordash/UberEats/etc. and PH’s own deliveries? If the Doordash sales are significantly larger than the in-house delivery sales, they might well see getting rid of delivery as a no-brainer.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:02 AM on December 30, 2023

Can someone tell me which ones have a Seeburg Jukebox and Pac-Man Cabaret?
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:39 AM on December 30, 2023 [1 favorite]