What was Pizza Hut for? It’s worth asking, as it seems to be on the way out. The pizza chain has announced that it will be closing 68 restaurants, and making 1,210 people redundant in the process. Administrators have been appointed to save the remaining 64 restaurants.
They should not. Let it die! Every job loss is sad, but the market must do its work. From the very start, Pizza Hut has always been a strange thing. It didn’t know what it was: a nice environment to have a pizza in with the family, or an adequate hangover-rescue service. It tried to straddle the two; it failed.
The circumstances by which you would “want a Pizza Hut” in 2025 are probably limited to a “recent head injury”. I’m looking at the online menu now, and I feel sick. A chicken sizzler! A beef sizzler! Texan BBQ and a “hot honey pepperoni feast”? Some people like this stuff, and it is good that they are being saved from themselves.
I can see the advantage if you have kids. But Pizza Express has perfected the formula better than Pizza Hut ever did: an edible American Hot is on the menu for the adults, dough balls and ice cream for the kids, colouring pencils galore, and the veneer of sophistication from those marble tables and blue glasses.
On the other hand, if it really was just an embarrassment of calories you wanted, then Domino’s does that job perfectly well. The once a year you have a Domino’s carries with it a romance a Pizza Hut never could: that mouth-cutting cornmeal on the base, the atherosclerotic pepperoni cups, the sauce so sweet that it’s basically a cake.
My first experience of Pizza Hut – at about 13 – left me and my friend both sweating, and induced perhaps my very first episode of heartburn.
It’s a sign of cultural maturity that Pizza Hut seems finished. We are a nation that now has a higher standard for food; we are less forgiving of the mediocre. In fact, one of the things that Britain has improved most in recent years is the quality of what we eat.
Pizza Hut is a legacy of those darker days where we were more willing to consume whichever fast food had the best ads. After the barren 1970s, the public lapped Pizza Hut up throughout the 1980s and 1990s as part of a sugar rush for American culture. Anything that came across the Atlantic – with all the swagger, the excess, the whizz of money and high blood pressure – was deemed to be good.
Even as recently as the 1990s and the 2000s, we were gorging ourselves on Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King. These places still do well, but you get a sense their cultural caché has dimmed. And thank goodness for that; we can do so much better.
In fact, if there is a problem now, it might be that pizza is treated with perhaps too much sincerity. At Crisp in Hammersmith, “dough” has to be reserved at the beginning of the week: things have gotten out of hand so they’re moving to Mayfair. At Dough Hands in Hackney, people wait two hours for a pizza.
All this is not to claim that Pizza Hut didn’t have some good years. It is that it hasn’t done enough to justify its continued existence.
Watch the advert with Chris Waddle, Stuart Pearce and Gareth Southgate, filmed after Southgate’s famous penalty miss at Euro 96.
