Reading the comments tells me that most people here do not appreciate exactly how far Pizza Hut fell. For many Gen-X’s 1980’s Pizza Hut was peak dining. The pizza was buttery deliciousness with full table service like a fancy restaurant, complimentary salad bar for my mom, fancy booths or tables, mood lighting for the folks on a date, and a video game arcade. Going to Pizza Hut was an event. I tried Pizza Hut again in the 2010’s and vowed to never attempt to soil my memories like that ever again.
Remember the book-it pizza thing?
Oh man that was the best
I never tasted a more delicious pizza than the personal pan pepperoni I earned from absolutely crushing the Book-It program. That big holographic button, covered in achievement stars. The pizza. Pure bliss.
mine only had 4 pepperoni slices and never enough cheese so i had to spread it around more evenly to enjoy it and it was still 99% bread. lol
The only Pizza Hut “near” me growing up was the one by my grandmas house so when we saw her it was basically a given we were gonna turn my book-it in.
100% the only pizza I even liked growing up.
They still do this actually. Not quite as cool as when we were kids, but my son brought home a coupon last year for his pizza!
My kid’s school still does Book It but our closest Pizza Hut doesn’t have personal pan pizzas. So they give us a small pizza instead. It’s just not the same.
Pretty much any big name pizza place is the same story. A cycle of “make it smaller”, “make it out of cheaper ingredients”, “put less on it” and “make it cost more” has left most of them barely recognisable as pizza.
The best pizza near any of us is probably from a local family run pizza place.
The best value pizza is probably Costco.
I don’t know why everybody else continues to exist. A mountain of brand recognition heading towards oblivion.
Whereas nowadays if you want to have the modern Pizza Hut experience you can order pizza from anywhere… then just eat the box. 😬
THE DESSERT PIZZAS
Pizza Hut buffet was a good deal for the price and quality, if you wanted to go have a lunch of real pizza.
Our local one is still here but they sold the big red roof building and moved into a strip mall. No inside dining, carry out only. I miss the drive-through though - used to be able to just order online or call and not have to get out of my car to get it. Now I have to park and walk inside and my precious convenience is reduced. But I still refuse to pay for Doordash type bullshit.
There is a pizza hut nearby that still does buffets. I went about a year ago. It wasn’t bad.
pizza hut in the small town i grew up in stayed like that until the 2018 when the sole owner died and his inheritors outsourced its management rather than returning to bfe to run it (i don’t blame them) and i feel like that’s how most older establishments enshittify.
there was no way he was making money, but he CLEARLY loved pizza & people and was happy doing it.
Such fond memories. This and Shakey’s.
Really around here they have made a come back
Could someone elaborate which empire this used to be, for the non-US users? 🙂
I think this was Pizza Hut?
edit: yup
I assumed this is a Pizza Hut based on the roof but they still exist so I’m not sure it fits?
I like the version of this meme that’s a picture of a building with an outline of a former Sears logo on the front
They still exist, but the Pizza Hut chain and it’s remain restaraunts are shadows of what they used to be. Pizza Hut was awesome in the 80’s. Now the old one near my house is a church.
Our Lady of Unlimited Salad Bar
Same for Olive Garden. Enshittification and placating shareholders came for them both.
…it’s mind-boggling from today’s perspective just how good the olive garden was in the eighties: we reserved a table for my graduation and it was a properly respectable dinner…
It’s hard for me to explain to people the unique tier that Olive Garden (and separately Pizza Hut) existed in.
There were many nicer Italian places than Olive Garden. It wasn’t pretentious at all, but it was nice and ubiquitous. Maybe a little better than PF Changs today? (Not that I’m very familiar with PF Changs). No one would laugh at you for taking a date there.
Pizza Hut was more casual by far, largely because you’d have kids playing arcade games and whatnot. Pizza Hut was more family oriented, but still more classy than most things we have today.
Maybe Texas Roadhouse is closer to accurate.
…in its prime, olive garden was very similar to red lobster: upscale suburban is perhaps a good description…
…these days they’re both well past their prime and i’m not sure a similar national chain comes to mind; it seems like only regional chains are playing in that space…
The closest one to my house is a liquor store now.
Now the old one near my house is a church.
This guy is really into pizza.
Idk which is more depressing, your church or the other person replying and their liquor store
An extinct civilisation called Heetzah Putt, rumoured to be near the lost city of Atlantis.
This belongs in a museum!!
This pizza Hut needs to be turned into a pizza HOME
really want someone to buy one, remodel it as a home to live in, then install a wood-fired pizza oven
I know at least one in our town that’s turned into a cannabis dispensary. Seems to me a smart business man would figure out how to combine the two…
Cheba Hut comes close and is a real place, but they don’t sell weed…yet
No weed, but they do have Koolaid, which kinda makes up for it.
The maintenance on those buildings at this point would be major. Probably not worth the investment.
There is one near me that is now a church.
With that logo and those buildings, they were clearly supposed to be named Pizza Hat until they changed it at the last minute.
More’s the pity, since “hut” never made sense for pizza and Pizza Hat sounds like the ultimate slacker Halloween costume 😁
In Germany it was always confusing but fun because “hut” just means hat
Hut always made sense to me. Making pizza in a hut… sort of a quaint name when thought of that way
You just solved history.
I did? Where’s my celebratory sash?
fancy it up and the red still bleeds
Mmmm Cora
Guess they got out-pizza’d after all
Looks like a Chinese buffet to me
That would be 3 different Chinese buffets over a 5 year period!
I can still smell the smoking section
Ours moved in to a strip mall and went pick up or delivery only. The old location is a really over priced shitty coffee house now.
Apparently Yum! Foods Inc (the owners of Taco Bell, KFC, A&W, Long John Silvers, and of course Pizza Hut), has been going around buying back a bunch of the old Red Roof stores (as they’re known internally, they’re actually a different district than a “regular” store right down the street, too) with plans to reopen them, salad bars and all.
I love seeing places that were clearly something else. Plenty of places in old Pizza Huts. But I really wanna see the Wienerschnitzel in my city that operates out of a giant hot dog go out of business and then have, like, a cigarette store open up inside the giant hot dog.
A lot of the best taquerias in my area are in the old taco bell Spanish style buildings
So they didn’t end up winning the restaurant wars after all.
They only won that in the non US version. Here in the US it was Taco Bell
Guys guys relax
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are both owned by the same corporate conglomerate that owns Pepsi, KFC, and every other fast food chain that only serves Pepsi.
The reference is to a old action movie called Demolition Man. In the movie there was only one restaurant that survived the franchise wars. In the US it was Taco Bell and in Europe it was Pizza hut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)#Filming
You can also read up on the Three Seashells.
You don’t know how to use the three shells, admit it
I’m not telling you. You can figure it out yourself.
TIL
(European here, obviously)
Pepsi sold them off a long time ago.
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No that was Taco Bell.
Both owned by Yum! Foods Inc, oddly enough. It’s like the Marines winning a war against the Coast Guard lol.
Yeah the full and complete story of the joke in this comment chain:
In 1993 there was a somewhat offbeat slightly Sci-Fi action movie called Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock. Stallone plays a cop from the then future dystopian year of 1996 being frozen for several decades only to emerge into a late 21st century future where the entire world is rated G, the police have to be told what a murder is.
In one humorous aside/extremely blatant product placement, Stallone’s character is invited to a fancy dinner at Taco Bell. Making small talk with Bullock’s character on the way, he mentions that he feels strange being taken out to a fast food restaurant, and Bullock’s character says that Taco Bell “won the franchise wars” and so now ALL restaurants are Taco Bell. Cue the cast arriving at a fancy four-star restaurant that serves plates of artfully drizzled sauce with a futuristic Taco Bell sign out front.
That’s the original version that Americans are familiar with, at least. In 1993, there were effectively no Taco Bell restaurants in the UK (There were two; both at RAF bases that had attached USAF presences, and the restaurant was restricted to base personnel) so the joke/product placement was lost on the British public. I don’t know if they altered it in theaters (or if the movie got a theatrical release in the UK at all) but for television broadcast in the UK, the scene had its dialog redubbed to change the joke to Pizza Hut, a sibling brand at the time under PepsiCo’s fast food division. Which is why you will see people referencing the movie swear the joke was Pizza Hut rather than Taco Bell: Because in their region it was.
