At 1:15 pm yesterday, I felt as if I had been hit in the face with a saucepan, or that I had just come from visiting puppies about to be euthanized. Lunch at Pizza Hut made me feel that bad.
This wasn't my idea. This was my boss' spark of genius - he wanted us to check them out to better understand the Pizza Hut operation. We chose a location close to the office, but Google Maps gave us the absolute wrong directions and we ended up calling 411 to find a location that wasn't as close but at least easy to find.
The walls were wood-grain finish, the windows were vintage 1979, and the banquettes were just as ancient. The only modern touch was the green-tinted pool hall lights hung above each table on a gold-finished chain. An ancient steam table kept the pizza warm on the buffet and a salad bar stocked with iceberg lettuce, cottage cheese and a few composed salads rounded out the selection. Dessert was pizza dough, dusted in cinnamon. As a non-wheat eater (yeah, I'm sticking to the wheat-free thing) I was pretty limited - I went for the salad bar.
One of the salads, a 'three-bean', was fermented. It fizzed in my mouth in a most subtle way. I pushed it aside to eat a mixture of cottage cheese, sunflower seeds, and iceberg lettuce which tasted relatively uncontaminated. My boss ate pizza that had been under the heat lamp way too long, and yelled something about the melt point of the cheese.
The restaurant was strangely quiet. Diners focused on shoveling food down their gullets -- well, except for the table next to us, workers from a nearby office who were picking at their pizza and salads. They were more engaged in chat than the food, and they didn't seem to notice the chips on the ancient plastic composite plates or the graininess of the cheese on the pizza.
Hey, for a $5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet you can't beat Pizza Hut for value. The trade-off, though, is quality. Obviously.
Now I 'get' Pizza Hut, but I really wish I didn't.
As a friend recently stated, "sitting in the Pizza Hut for lunch yesterday was probably a pretty good tip-off that you've sold out..."
