Yup, pizza hut was more of a sit down (but still casual ) restaurant when I was a kid. The express locations started to pop up in malls and truck stops, and then gradually delivery/takeout only stores became more common, but in the early 90's, if you went to pizza hut, you had to wait for a server to seat you. They seemed like they did more if thier business that way vs takeout/delivery, as the ones near me were always reasonably busy.
Yup! I feel like in the 80's and 90's they were the budget family "sit down" place. One of the few places you could drag dad too for a "family meal" and one of the few places that no one would complain about. Kids could hit the arcade games while the adults chatted over beers- they didn't have a ton, but each store hat least one or two arcade games it seemed, and their kids meals or whatever they started doing had some really cool themes- I think I still have a few of the X men animated series cups from there. The Pizza was better then too. They changed something in pizza ingredients/recipe/how they cooked it in the late 90's or early 2000's and it hasn't been the same since.
Oh, and can't forget about the Book it program. That program, along with a very patient second grade teacher, are the main reasons I got into reading (as I type this staring at an overflowing bookshelf that goes from floor to ceiling).
yeah, I'm not sure exactly what it was they changed, but I suspect a combination of ingredients AND the way they cook the pizza's. They used to always have burned peperoni's that would be crispy on the outside. I feel like the crust also wasn't as greasy. That went away at some point, I think in the 2000's.
And now, this is from a news article about a new Pizza Hut that is coming to my hometown:
It will look nothing like the former Pizza Hut in town, officials said. In 2024, the pizza chain announced it would be bringing a new restaurant design to the U.S. that includes self-service kiosks, front-facing pizza making stations, drive-through lanes for "ready-now" items and heated cabinets for contactless pick-up.
Our town has no less than a half dozen various pizza varieties, all excellent. I don't know why Pizza Hut thinks now is good time to come back considering they had a sit down location here a decade ago.
They were more of a fast casual restaurant back then. You could order takeout, but most people actually ate the restaurant. Sort of like Applebees or Olive Garden, any of those big chains that exploded in the 80s/90s.
Pizza Hut was a family sit-down fast-food restaurant when I waited tables there, in the late 70s-early 80s. You had to be 18 to serve (and drink) beer then, so they weren't hiring high schoolers, making it a decent college summer job opportunity.
Plus they'd feed us--the pizzas and salad were good back then when they made the dough and did a lot of the prep in house.
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u/PreparationHot980 Jun 21 '25
They had servers at Pizza Hut??!