Pizza Hut

 

Rating: 9/10 Complaints: Cold, Late, Average, Meh, Middling, Expectation was Low and Still Disappointed, Undercooked, Pale, 45 Minute Wait, Pizza Hut, Downhill since the 90s, No Dessert Bar Anymore 

I don't seriously think anyone orders food from Pizza Hut expecting it to be fine dining, but our recent foray into ordering from Pizza Hut really took the cake (or should that be pie?) We normally go to Hell's or Domino's, both of which are perfectly fine and do the job (it is takeaway pizza after all, and you sort of have to approach it with an open mind, hungry belly and a low expectation).

Pizza Hut, similarly to so many well-loved institutions fondly recalled by anyone old enough to remember Y2K and handkerchief tops, has taken quite a dramatic nose dive in terms of food, service and atmosphere over the past 25 years or so. For those who missed out by being born too late, Pizza Hut used to be completely different to what you see now.

Once upon a time, a visit to Pizza Hut meant putting on your best corduroy pants and Tamagotchi necklace and being ferried in the back of an 80s Mitsubishi Lancer, to the Palace of Pizza. Pizza Hut used to be a fully blown restaurant complete with actual cups, plates, waitstaff and suspicious casino carpeting designed to hide all manner of stains. You'd take a seat with your parents and then be allowed to go and choose your own slices of pizza, as well as chips and a few salady things. From memory it was all you can eat, this was before the time of germ phobia and COVID so naturally there were hands, toys and probably a lot of coughs and bogies smeared all over the warming tray.

 I've heard that Pizza Hut used to keep the kale industry in business by using it to decorate the salad bar, before kale was rebranded as a "superfood", started getting sold in cloth bags and the price doubled for what is essentially just a leathery, spiky lettuce best left to the cows, who have the teeth and equipment necessary to digest such a vegetable. There was never any kale on the pizzas back in the golden days as we hadn't evolved to digest it yet, just the usual simple toppings and loads of melted cheese. 

The dessert bar at the old school Pizza Hut was a legend among children and I miss it as an adult. Unconstrained by diet culture, any inklings of healthy eating or any modern judgy sugarfree beige parents, kids would be released after dinner to go full Augustus Gloop with full access to a chocolate sauce fountain as well as jelly, mousse, ice cream and those mini marshmallows that used to get rolled up in a paper towel for snacking later on. Looking back on this I can't quite believe that kids were allowed to run amok with an unlimited dessert bar and these simpler times just go to show that sometimes kids SHOULD be allowed to run wild and get the chance to learn what "eyes bigger than your belly" actually means, instead of having all their choices made for them, food weighed by a team of nutritionists and sent home from school for the crime of cookies in the lunchbox. I remember my dad losing his mind because he'd found a treasure trove of Pizza Hut marshmallows stuffed behind one of the seats in the car, which I also believe to be a childhood rite of passage. I also can't wait to gleefully send my own kids to school with little treats and breathe fire at anyone who tries to ruin their fun.

Which brings us to the Pizza Hut of today. A shadow of its former glory, this relic has rebranded to become the soggiest, most average, least interesting pizza chain this side of the Equator. It's basically the Lindsay Lohan of fast food and you do end up feeling a little sorry for it as well, it had genuine talent and has now become a punchline.

Gone are the palatial buildings, dessert bars, curly kale and all the bells and whistles. The closest thing you'll find to a Pizza Hut building these days, is the logo and perhaps a façade tucked into a depressing strip mall. It seems now to have been pared back to just the kitchen and a counter, having completely made the downgrade from a restaurant setting to the worst kind of fast food - greasy, carby, characterless and leaving you wishing you'd just got off your butt and cooked. I haven't had anything good from Pizza Hut since 2002.

Our recent order from Pizza Hut - well, I'd say it was disappointing although I was expecting some level of disappointment. Which is pretty jolly disappointing. For some reason all the pizza toppings seem to taste the same no matter what you order, so we went with a nice classic pepperoni with the mozzarella stuffed crust. To accompany this we ordered some of their hash bites and "BBQ Chicken Tenders". 

I wish we hadn't. When the delivery was 10 minutes late we started to wonder where it was, by the time it was 20 minutes late we were considering doing the unheard of and calling the restaurant. By the time the pizza arrived, it was about the same temperature as used bathwater and just about as soggy. Rounds of pepperoni held together with melted cheese threatened to slide off the pizza and onto my dress with every bite. I must say the pizza crust and base were the heroes of this dish, they were quite a glorious arrangement of stodgy carbs and equally stodgy cheese and sometimes this is exactly what you need to round off a Sunday afternoon spent doing absolutely nothing.

The hash bites are the sort of thing that has the potential to be very good indeed depending on how they are cooked. They need to be beautifully browned and golden for best results. Unfortunately, it didn't look like these had been cooked at all, or perhaps someone had flicked a cigarette lighter once or twice in their general vicinity. The pale colour of raw potato had been faithfully preserved and the bites glistened offputtingly with fryer grease. Mr Karenson usually can't pass up a spud in any form, but even he wasn't able to withstand the combination of undercooked and overgreased.

The BBQ Chicken Tenders were another thing that's easy to get right but Pizza Hut managed to get wrong. Soggy and stifled in their cardboard box, they were sadder than a wet weekend and drizzled most unattractively in what should really have been served as a dipping sauce. The sauce had started to congeal by the time the food was served, presenting the general effect of something out of a dumpster, and the chicken had a texture not dissimilar to a rubber yoga mat and was somehow greasier inside than out. The sauce drizzle just isn't a good idea with food that has to travel, and it's also impossible to get it over the chicken evenly unless it's served as a dipping sauce. 

Honestly I think we would have done better to buy a frozen pizza from the supermarket and add a few extra toppings. This desultory offering set us back about $40 (would have been $55 without the coupon would you believe it). Will seriously reconsider before ordering here again, there are other pizza chains who do a basic pizza much better. I almost feel like Pizza Hut is still resting on its reputation from the glory days and no longer feels the need to even try to serve halfway decent food because everyone already knows their name and it's either that or Dominos at the lower end of the food chain.

 I'd suggest maybe it's time to either follow Blockbuster, or invest in at least a set of blow torches for the kitchen instead of cigarette lighters to get those hash bites nice and crispy. A return of the dessert bar would also be amazing, so long as it isn't modernized to include kale alongside the ice cream.