New Pizza Hut Menu

At least for me, that’s the reason right there. My local pizza places do decent thin crust, but either don’t do pan at all or it’s bad, and I’m a pan kind of guy. If I’m in Chicago or something I’ll go get the real thing, but otherwise, Pizza Hut is the place I know I can get something with decently thick crust that’s worthwhile. (And I’ll have to try Dominos pan, haven’t had it since their revamp.)

Yeah it’s different for me, in that the local chains are supreme for me. I can go Giordano’s, Gino’s East, Lou Malnati’s and get a pizza I like. They are decidedly chains, but of a local type. National chains like Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Pappa John’s? Forget it.

There are some good local places too. Barone’s has a pretty fantastic deep dish, and it’s what I normally get since it is by far the closest. That’s a one off shop. When I lived in Wheaton I’d pick from any of the big 3, as they were all within a few miles. I dunno, pizza is weird in Chicagoland. Most of what non Chicagoans say about getting pizza simply does not square with my experiences.

This has been the tricky part for me. Pizza Hut was the go-to in our family when I was a kid, so that’s in theory still my favorite of the major chains. Papa John’s was the closest and cheapest in college, so I’ve eaten a ton of that too (everyone gets to the point in college where they know your order by your phone number when you call in, right?).

Pizza Hut when done right is much better than Papa John’s, but the Pizza Hut I live near now is pretty hit-or-miss. Papa John’s, everywhere I’ve ever ordered it, is exactly the same. Which, like price, sometimes matters a lot.

I’m also embarrassed to admit I eat a lot of Little Caesars deep dish. If I just want a lot of delicious burnt cheese for my money (and I often do), $8 for “one” deep dish—which is actually two square pizzas—is a lot of perimeter.

To me, a Dominos / fast food pizza is just a different category of food than an actual good pizza. Sometimes, I want to eat the garbage. Even here in New York, real brick-oven Neapolitan style (Grimaldi’s / Totonno’s) pizza and good local pizzeria pizza are different categories.

It’s the same way that sometimes I’ll want to eat a burger with a home-ground blend of chuck and short rib and home-made mayo, and sometimes I just want a Big Mac.

Also, Dominos is really super cheap.

Dominos is so easy now, and so cheap. You order online and 30-40 minutes later the pizza shows up. And it’s not bad. We tend to get it when the 13 year old has a friend over for an overnight. Give kids pizza and they’re happy, and I’m happy with leftovers.

Yeah, a big part of it all for me is convenience, price, and reliability. Here in NC, “great” pizza would probably not even warrant disdain from a New Yorker (too shitty to even give it that much thought), though, after 4 years in school w/ a bunch of New Yorkers at BU, I’ve come to sort of think their opinions on everything are bullshit ;).

But in any case, after having 3-4 local joints that are highly rated on Yelp! and UrbanSpoon, I’ve come to the conclusion that none of them are worth the price, time, and ease premium over PH, Dominos, or even–yes–Lil C’s. Particularly for takeout. Now, if I want the full pizzeria experience, there’s one place i can go for that that’s decent, but it also winds up costing twice as much as ordering a pie apiece for me and the missus, so. . . I guess what I’m saying is, if we’re gonna dress up, go out, and drop a significant percentage of my monthly “fun” budget on a single meal, why not get something a little fancier than pizza, anyway?

but where I live there are more local pizza places than there are, well, damn near anything else, and pretty much each and every one has superb pies.

I admit that I expected the “My experience is everyone’s experience, therefor let me judge all of you” guy to show up a lot earlier in this thread than this. Look, it’s 2015 now. Can we realize that the folks in this thread aren’t idiots, have working tastebuds, and possess a modicum of culinary refinement? Can we then assume that there are reasons why the folks talking about chain pizzas do so? Why are you “baffled”? Unfamiliar with how the

I love these threads. You’re always guaranteed to get the shocked guy who can’t believe people order mass produced foods or beverages. Clip and save for beer and fast food as well.

We don’t all live in Wombatville, a magical place of wonderful pizza awesomeness. In fact, if you live in a place that serves nothing but bad pizza–fantastically, horrifically bad pizza–chain pizzas are likely BETTER than anything locally. For instance, I challenge anyone to find a pizza place within delivery distance of my home to come up with a place that isn’t trying to push out awful, worse-than-frozen pizzas. Pickup? No thanks. I ride the train to work each day, so I’m not grabbing something on the way home from work. If I’m going out to eat, it’s to go out to eat for social reasons or grab something for just myself in a hurry that I don’t have to worry about refrigerating leftovers from. I’ve found one good pizza place in the entire DC metro area, and that’s in downtown DC. Love it, but it’s a destination, a night out in a nice pizza pub.

So, it’s delivery on pizza for us. And if we’re going to do delivery, it’s going to be a chain. We try new places as they open in our area (and usually stay open for a maximum of a year until the quality of the food–or lack thereof–shuts them down), and they’re not only not as good as the chains, they’re actually significantly, monumentally worse. They’re also more expensive.

Mind you, in the past I’ve eaten more than my share of college-day Dominos and Pizza Hut stuff,

Did you miss the “new” in the thread title, or how throughout this thread that people are discussing the improvements these chains have made to attempt to improve their offerings?

Does the new menu have the cheeseburger stuffed crusts on it?

I really liked Maggies up near AMU, but that was years ago. But my opinion on DC was that it was hard to find any decent food, delivery or not. I treasured the handful of decent restaurants I discovered over the three years I was there. Otherwise, a half-smoke off of a food cart was as good as anything else and cheaper. The city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency did not inherit the Southern tradition of laying out the groceries.

When we moved to Texas, the food got much better and the waitstaff got a heck of a lot more polite. Go figure.

Now I live within delivery distance of a Campisi’s. Spoiled.

EDIT: on-topic, that balsamic glaze is great.

My response was crankier than I intended. Sorry, TheWombat.

What RickH says has been our experience here as well, and I guess that’s why I get so frustrated talking about it. There’ actually a lot of great food in the area (Heck, I know of one particular steakhouse that’s REALLY good…;)), but none of it is particularly convenient.

Therefore, I’ve sadly begun to appreciate chains that are clean and execute what they’re supposed to do. Perhaps overly so.

Hey Triggercut, if you’re ever out Annapolis way let me know and I’ll spring for some really good NY style pizza. We finally had a good place open up just down the street. A little slice of pizza heaven!

Oh man, when I was in DC, I managed to eat at three great places (Good Stuff burgers in Arlington and then Amsterdam Falafel and JJs Cheesesteaks near U St. stop on the metro) in a row before leaving. It was a real treat. I did have to do a lot of sifting to find what was good, though. . .

The mom & pop pizza places here serve just dreadful pizza, though. The crust is generic, kind of hard, and not quite thin, not quite thick. It’s just this sort of rough, thinnish dry biscuity stuff. Like you’d get from a Tony’s out of a box at a grocery store.

The sauce is really bland, uninteresting stuff that tastes like ketchup. Well worse. You can make passably awful pizza sauce at home with ketchup, oregano, garlic powder, and onion salt. Most of the sauces I’ve had here are worse than that. They’re this orangey stuff.

The cheese is really generic and flavorless. It feels like it’s there for texture, not taste. The ingredients are usually solid, but the foundation they’re on is so bad, who cares? Someone who worked at a local pizzeria that I hired a few years ago told me that they made their crappy, soulless pies from scratch…but they made them deliberately bland so they’d appeal to more people, or at least that’s what the owner told them when they’d suggest dressing their pizzas up a notch.

Geppetto in Georgetown had top-notch deep dish pizza. They’d add the pepperoni after taking the pie out of the oven, frying it up and then tossing it on. Absolutely delicious.

Annoying day + this thread = pizza party at my place tonight

Well the best “chain pizza” is probably Uno’s :)

@ineffablebob:
Chicago pizza - I like Giordanos or Lou Malnati’s (I lean more to lou’s these days).

Never have been a fan of Uno’s too much, but they’re solid.

They’re just not Pequod’s.

EDIT: Never mind. I won’t dignify this post with a response.

All this talk of pizza got to me, so it was Dominos tonight. Two medium two-topping pies and a sandwich for $19 as carryout. Hard to beat that, especially when it’s also going to be a cold pizza breakfast for me tomorrow. Yum.

I WON’T DIGNIFY YOUR FACE WITH A RESPONSE!!!ONE

Why are we angry again?

Oh, right, because several of us are not currently eating delicious pizza. Life is always a little worse without a bite of fresh pizza in your mouth.