[QUOTE=adam yax]
I’m not exactly sure where you live but Rockin’ Tomato has great pizza as does Home Slice on south Congress.
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I live pretty far north, practically PVille. We do have a Mangia’s and a Brick Oven nearby but I figured this was more of a take-out oriented thread. But, yeah, good call on the Rockin’ Tomato. Been there a few times.
[QUOTE=Lightray]
and those horrible rectangular “pizzas” we used to get served in school cafeterias fifteen-twenty years back. shudder
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See I loved those because they weren’t like anything we had at home (and my sack lunch was a PB&J, the lastest in a daily ten-year series).
I love Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s with stuffed crust, and their cheesy breadsticks with marinara sauce. I also enjoy the all-you-can-eat pizza lunch.
I also enjoy a white slice or a slice in NYC, although I have a phobia about touching flour so I have to wrap the crust in a napkin. “Not too hot” though, or the slice gets too crisp for me.
I also enjoy pizza at Italian restaurants that specialize in such.
I also enjoy baking up a DiGiorno deep dish or stuffed crust pizza.
It’s all yummy.
[QUOTE=elmwood]
Most locally owned restaurants in Buffalo can’t cook a decent a steak to save their lives. Chains fill the void; the slabs of meat that come off the grill at places like Outback Steakhouse and Montana’s are far superior. Even steak from Applebee’s is better than what’s served in all but the highest-end steakhouses in Buffalo. I’d imagine that in a place like … oh, Amarillo, where there’s not a large upper-middle-class foodie population or Italian-American community, the modal pizza is probably going to be just edible. Pizza Hut, by comparison, will be pretty good.
The pizza of my hometown generally tromps Pizza Hut – there’s very few franchise or national chain pizzerias in Buffalo. However, I’ve been in a lot of cities and towns where the mom & pop pizza is universally mediocre or bad. Pizza Hut pizza isn’t bad, but compared to some of the small town indie pizza I’ve had, it’s really, really good. When I was living in Las Cruces, Pizza Hut had the best pie in town; the few locally owned pizzerias baked pies what weren’t even up to high school cafeteria quality.
Why diss Pizza Hut? Sometimes, it’s geography. If you’re in a good pizza town, like Chicago, New York, or Buffalo, it’s because PH pizza is different than the dominant local style. Sometimes it’s elitism; the belief that chain restaurants are always, without exception, always worse than those that are locally owned.
[/QUOTE]
Spot on. Spot. On.
I like Pizza Hut. When people are complaining about the crust, I wonder which one they are getting? Pizza Hut offers three types of crust. I hate pan pizza. I really hate thick bready crusts on pizzas… I’d sooner just pick off the cheese and toppings and leave the crust. Pizza Hut’s thin 'n crispy crust is, for me, the perfect pizza crust. So many places get thin crust wrong. It’s soggy and nasty or it’s hard as a rock. Pizza Hut’s is perfect.
The other thing I’m wondering about is the greasy complaint. I have never had that problem. However, I think it may be an issue of what toppings you get. I am a vegetarian, so I never get meat toppings. That’s probably where all the grease comes from.
[QUOTE=pizzabrat]
Pizza Hut is fine - a nice firm layer of brown speckled cheese that’s not too gooey, huge chunks of fresh, vegetable toppings, and a thick, crispy, well oiled crust.
[/QUOTE]
You realize they offer three types of crust, right?
[QUOTE=gigi]
I have a phobia about touching flour so I have to wrap the crust in a napkin.
[/QUOTE]
Whoa, that’s one I’ve never heard. Can you explain? (sorry for the hijack)
On Tuesday in Kansas 1/3 of all the take at Pizza Hut on that day went towards the recovery efforts in Greensburg (where the tornado leveled the town).
To me that shows class.
I should also mention that Pizza Hut had pizza trucks with free pizza at Greensburg and at surrounding communities for both survivors and people helping with the recovery.
I like Pizza Hut - I went there for lunch today. It wasn’t bad at all. I wish we had really good pizza places here, but mostly Domino’s, Pizza Hut, a few local Giovanni’s, and we’re getting a Gatti’s - We also have Papa John’s, but I can’t handle it their food…
Hoo-ray for Pizza Hut…
Brendon Small
[QUOTE=OpalCat]
Whoa, that’s one I’ve never heard. Can you explain? (sorry for the hijack)
[/QUOTE]
I just can’t stand that feeling on my skin. I really wanted to learn to bake pies but my mom’s first step is to reach into the flour and make a circle on the table to roll dough out onto. ::shiver:: I recoiled and buy my pies at the store. 
And floury bread and crust, etc., must be covered for me to pick it up, or I wet my fingers to pick it up. Just looking at someone touching flour makes me have a tic-motion in my fingers/hands.
[QUOTE=TV time]
On Tuesday in Kansas 1/3 of all the take at Pizza Hut on that day went towards the recovery efforts in Greensburg (where the tornado leveled the town).
To me that shows class.
[/QUOTE]
They used to let school organizations take over the restaurant for a night and the kids actually make pizza (they’d give them some training first) and take half the profits or somesuch for fundraisers.
Pretty cool deal and fun for the kids, too (except for the ones who were already working fast food, of course).
So here we have a big corporation, with ties to Pepsi and guys who drive around with lit up thingies on their cars, providing mediocre but not particularly bad pizza, sometimes serving as some flyover country town’s sole source of food with any hint of ethnicity. And they’re known for giving back to the community. Are they decent folk, or do they just want to make nice because they put PCBs in their cheese? Who knows?
The range of opinions on PH and PHs role in society or somesuch is an interesting study, actually. Maybe I’ll make a mockumentary about it, dazzle Sundance, wow Cannes, then spend the rest of my life in sick splendor. :insert Bill & Ted fake guitar riff here::
Pizza Butt is a step over Dominos and 2 over Little Caesars. They all are better than any frozen pie. LaNova in Buffalo is very good. Any pizza is better than no pizza.
I like lots of types of pizza. I’m from NY, so I like NY style pizza, and the sicilian slices I got from a place in my neighborhood. Then I moved to near the best pizza in the world (Papa Del’s, Champaign Illinois.) I’m fine with the original Unos and Giordano’s, and even the Uno’s chain. We have Roundtable around here, which isn’t too bad. I hadn’t eaten frozen pizza in years, but a while back I got a DiGiorno’s, and it was suprisingly good.
So I’m not a snob. But Pizza Hut or Domino’s? Blech. I’ve never had Papa Johns. I’ll take frozen over them any day.
[QUOTE=pizzabrat]
My thoughts exactly (except with no quotes around “different”). Pizza snobs always sound so idiotic to me when they go on about a specific, regional type of pizza as if there’s some narrow continuum of pizza and they’ve discovered its apex - ironically making themselves sound sheltered and ignorant. There’s no “best pizza”, there are too many types of pizza for that to be so. Pizza Hut is fine - a nice firm layer of brown speckled cheese that’s not too gooey, huge chunks of fresh, vegetable toppings, and a thick, crispy, well oiled crust.
EDIT: Though I should disclaim that I wouldn’t touch any of their horrifying pizza “creations” with a 10-foot-pole…
[/QUOTE]
Some of the best pizza places in the world are in New Haven, Connecticut, and, ironically enough, they actually use a pizza peel with a ten foot handle (basically a ten-foot pole), because they make the pies in gigantic brick coal-fired ovens. These ovens get much hotter than the electric or gas ones used elsewhere and are one reason the pizza there is so good.
As for Pizza Hut pizza, it’s OK pizza, but tastes terrible the next day cold. In my mind, one mark of a good pizza is when it tastes good cold.
[QUOTE=gigi]
I just can’t stand that feeling on my skin. I really wanted to learn to bake pies but my mom’s first step is to reach into the flour and make a circle on the table to roll dough out onto. ::shiver:: I recoiled and buy my pies at the store.
And floury bread and crust, etc., must be covered for me to pick it up, or I wet my fingers to pick it up. Just looking at someone touching flour makes me have a tic-motion in my fingers/hands.
[/QUOTE]
Wow. I love the feeling of flour on my hands.. it’s soft and cool. But who am I to talk? Seeing somebody scratch an itch and end on an “inward” stroke (bending the fingers or otherwise moving the nails in that direction) rather than an “outward” stroke (straightening the fingers, or otherwise moving the nails in that direction) will distract me for the next hour with the heebie jeebies, and cause me to need to press my own nails down over and over. But then, I have Tourette’s.
Pizza Hut was the only kind of pizza (besides that cheap Chef Boyardee stuff) that I used to eat as a kid. Papa Johns didn’t exist back in those days, and even as a kid with indiscriminating tastes, I thought Dominoes sucked. (Plus, it didn’t help that my mother worked there for a few months. The whole family is still traumatized by the paper uniform she had to wear).
There was a Pizza Hut restaurant down the street from us. Whenever we went out for pizza, that was the place we would go. I loved the way the place smelled. I loved the red and white plastic tableclothes, and the Centipede arcade game with the horizontal console (how that white ball would pinch you good!) The server would come out with the deep dish whatever and it would be the high point of my life up to that point. I would go home so satisfied that I would dream of being rich enough to eat Pizza Hut every day.
But then two things happened:
- Papa Johns came to Atlanta
- I ate too many times at my college food court’s Pizza Hut and I got sick of it.
Pizza Hut is okay. It’s better than Little Caeser’s and Dominoes and many family-run places. It’s not as good as Papa Johns and the better family-run places (like the place across the street from me). I’ve found that Pizza Hut doesn’t make for great leftovers. Its grease content seems to skyrocket with age. And I can’t eat their breadsticks anymore. They make me have flashbacks to my college gluttony.
[QUOTE=monstro]
Pizza Hut was the only kind of pizza (besides that cheap Chef Boyardee stuff) that I used to eat as a kid…
[/QUOTE]
Chef Boyardee made/makes a pizza! Does/did it come in a can :eek: ?
It often depends on the individual branch whether it’s good or not. We have Pizza Hut in Thailand; some locations are great, some are awful. Same with The Pizza Company, a Pizza Hut knock-off owned and operated by an American entrepreneur. But yes, I like Pizza Hut, too.
But I have to say it’s not the best pizza here. That would arguably be, for anyone coming here, the pizza served in Madrid Bar in the Patpong red-light district. Madrid Bar itself is interesting in that not only is it one of the two or three oldest bars in Patpong, it was a favorite of Tony Poe’s, the legendary CIA operative who was the real-life inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. (Tony died in the U.S. a few years ago after being deported from Thailand for general mayhem.) Back in the war, the Air America offices were in Patpong, and Madrid Bar was a regular hangout. AND they make damned fine pizza; I recommend the Madrid Special for a real treat.
And one of the ways in which I’ve watched Thailand advance over the years is the introduction of pizza home delivery. Now THAT’S civilization. 
A thread about chain pizza. My, my. I have this tremendous urge to MOVE it somewhere, because it is not about FOOD, but I’m not sure which forum could handle it.
Now I have to all the way down to Avenue J and get Dominick to make me One With Everything.
– The Pizza Snob Moderator.
I like Pizza Hut’s Pan Pizza Supreme. I like the over yeasted dough they use and their spicy, (Black) Peppery sauce, if not a bit salty. The best part is the light coating of oil in the pan that gives the undercrust and edges a crispy, spongey, and paradoxically crispy texture, you’ll notice in the linked pizza the tiny bubbling and blistering of the golden crust, that’s What I’m talkin about! I think they also have a really tasty proprietary “sausage topping”.
They’ve stuck around and proliferated for a reason.
I agree that they don’t age well as cold pizza… the moisture content of their pizza is much too high for the sit. Best to eat PH fresh.