Episode 75: Pizza Haute

If you were born in the late 70s or early 80s, I'm sure you've experienced the feeling that the world has incrementally changed into something unrecognizable from what it was when you were coming up. Because it was piecemeal and iterative it certainly retains shadows and echoes of the past and the distinct alterations may be difficult to put your finger on. On the British Isles there lives an ordinary insect that speaks to this aesthetic drift over time. The pepper moth, once a papery-white moth with mottled grey coloration has evolved through the Industrial Revolution to become a charcoal miller as natural selection pressured their coloration to darken over time as the white individuals were more easily spotted by predators against the backdrop of soot that coated surfaces, thus leaving progressively darker individuals to survive and breed. Between 1848 and 1895, the species transformed entirely. To my knowledge, the peppered moth did not speciate; they are still genetically peppered moths just the same as their pre-industrial ancestors were, but they are objectively different.

Similarly, we've experienced an evolution in the dining environment over the past 40 years. Brands and establishments that were ubiquitous in our youth largely still exist, albeit in dramatically different forms. Social, economic, and preference pressures have driven restaurants to adapt or die (hypothetically), and that has lead to a level of homogenization that makes the fast food and casual dining landscape replete with unremarkable black bugs, similar to the moths in England in the 19th century.

If you saw an "original" peppered moth crawling amongst its charcoal cousins, it would stand out in stark relief and be, frankly, remarkable in its contrast against the new norm. Similarly, when you get to dip your toes in the kiddie pool of yesteryear, the gravity of what we've lost is immense. This week, we took the kids on a road trip deep into southwestern Ohio to visit a "classic" Pizza Hut in the town of Hillsboro. Setting aside the wisdom of carting a 14 year old and a 10 year old 4 hours both ways to go to a Pizza Hut, the experience was certainly fun, but it leaves you with a haunting feeling of what could have been.

Before we get into what the Hillsboro Pizza Hut *IS*, let's cover what it isn't. It isn't a perfect time capsule of a 1992-era Pizza Hut. The building has been updated and modernized with subtle alterations that do materially impact the perception of the space. They've installed recessed lighting in the middle of the dining room ceiling that glows with a phosphorescent intensity only the coldest white LED's can produce. Similarly, the individual light fixtures hanging over each booth have been equipped with a cool color temperature LED or CFL bulb that doesn't quite fulfill the roll of the incandescent bulbs of yesteryear in providing light, warmth, and ambience. There wasn't a salad bar, which was likely a covid-era removal that hasn't been restored. The pizza is obviously not produced in the same way it was 30 years ago. It's likely baked from frozen and they seemed to have backed off from the absolute saturation of the crust with whatever oil they used to drench the pans in prior to assembling the pie. The pizza comes out at a perfectly reasonable temperature compared to the molten-copper product you'd receive in exchange for your Book-it certificate. The waitress also didn't serve the first slice, stretching strands of cheese from each slice across drinks, silverware, and the vinyl gingham tablecloth. The corner of the restaurant adjacent to the restrooms simply afforded access to a side exit door as opposed to a pair of arcade cabinets and a claw machine, or perhaps a jukebox. But that's what it wasn't. Let's talk about what it was.

First of all, the sightline design of the approach to this Pizza Hut would be the envy of a Disney park designer. Through random coincidences of perspective, the building appears huge and is centered in your view as you approach. Up close, it doesn't appear that this Pizza Hut is remarkably bigger, though. When you enter, you step into a little foyer area where people may be picking up to-go orders. There is a sign in elaborate script saying "Please wait to be seated," but we were instructed to take a seat anywhere. Naturally, we chose the corner booth near the restrooms, where the cabinet games would have been if they were there. The booth was illuminated by its own Pizza Hut branded stained glass hanging light fixture, as mentioned before. The tablecloth was red and white gingham check, and there was a caddy with auxiliary menus, red pepper flakes, and parmesan cheese. The extra menus are a byproduct of the "enbiggening" of Pizza Hut's food offerings in the late 90s, during the pinnacle of pizza innovation (more on this later). This is when they started offering baked pastas and other items that strayed beyond the original scope of specialty pizzas on a smattering of crust styles.

We were there at 2pm on a Wednesday, so there was only one other family present. Our waitress came over and took our drink orders. As we looked around, we were impressed by how close the presentation was to what we expected from our memories. Certainly, there were divergences, as detailed in the earlier paragraph about the lighting and the salad bar. Overall, though, it was clear they weren't trying to be over-the-top retro. It was just an act of restraint to keep certain things as they were. When our drinks came out, we were delighted to see they came in red plastic tumblers with the frosted texture up to the lip. I had to get a photo of that because that was one of the first comments I got on social media when I posted about our trip.

The menu items were mostly familiar. However, the menus, themselves, were simply laminated print-outs rather than the full-color tri-folds with photos and graphics. Yes, I know. Don't eat at places with pictures of the food on the menu. This is Pizza Hut, so calm down there, Morimoto. Honestly, aside from the "personal pan pizza," I hadn't given much thought to what the classic Pizza Hut menu even consisted of. Luckily, those memories came flooding back as I read through the options. Your crust selections were Pan, Hand-Tossed, Thin Crust, and Stuffed Crust. The proprietary recipes, if you opted not to build your own, included classics like meat lovers, pepperoni lovers, and surpreme, among others. We ordered a pan pepperoni, pan supreme, hand tossed cheese, a salad, and an order of fries for our youngest. Listen, we don't eat this garbage regularly, but when in Rome...

Let's review the pizzas. First, we've already established that they come out at a responsible temperature instead of 2º away from the surface of the sun. Also, they are merely splashed with crust grease instead of being completely saturated. So on that front, I guess it's a push. How accurate could one's 30 year memory of taste and texture be, really? Perhaps it was dead-on, but I suspect this was several standard deviations away from the Platonic ideal Pizza Hut pie. But guess what? It doesn't matter. It was *close enough.*

Let's talk about this salad, though. Holy cow was it bad. Clearly, Pizza Hut has lost the institutional knowledge of what makes a great Pizza Hut salad. Obviously, you can't replicate the salad bar without a salad bar, but I suspect if 5 people made a salad bar salad and then exchanged them randomly amongst the other patrons, there would be enough similarity for anyone to identify it as a Pizza Hut salad. This was a gas station salad. Oh well, you get what you get.

So how much did this magnificent banquet cost? $53. A little over 10 hours of 1999 minimum wage could afford you this incredible bounty.

Was this a special visit to Pizza Hut *because* it was a special visit to a special Pizza Hut? Does 4 hours of highway driving elevate the baked-from-frozen pies and cast the exposed brick walls in a kinder light? Probably, to some extent. But you can't escape the fact that something unique and valuable has been lost and not just in Pizza Hut. It used to be that the design of a building was part of the experience of the business housed within. Taco Bell used to look like a Spanish Mission-style building. McDonalds was styled after a 1950's car hop burger joint. Red Lobster was like walking into a restaurant on a seaside pier, despite it being situated hundreds of miles from the ocean. Was the food shitty, then? Probably. I suspect it was less shitty than it is, now, but these weren't Michelin star establishments. They were, however, distinct brands with a distinct aesthetic, and it spoke to the customer before he even entered the building. I think this is what we've lost sight of as we've relentlessly pursued authenticity, quality, and purity while casting aside the pre-packaged restaurant in a box corporate real estate play that has marked the evolution of fast food and casual dining restaurants over the past 20 years.

Why do Taco Bell, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Dunkin Donuts all look like a standalone Verizon or AT&T store? What benefit is there *to the customer* from modern architecture and flat, sterile design language? What has the chain-dining experience become edible Helvetica? One could say these businesses evolved with the evolving preferences of their customers. The fact they are still in business speaks, perhaps, to the validity of these changes. Obviously, we can't A/B test past decisions in a parallel universe, but I do hope there is value in nostalgia and that customer demands can be focused on bringing back the tacky glory of what once was.

If you dismiss this sentiment as rose colored rear-view mirror gazing, perhaps we could frame it in a social or cultural context. The unique value proposition conveyed by individual brand identities was strongest during this period of time between the late 80s and late 90s. American dominance in the world, at that time, was won on more fronts than our modern hegemony is, today. The tip of the spear of American power was our culture, as white-bread midwestern as it was. We exported optimism and aspiration in hokey culture and fast fashion products. As cheap and tacky as we view American culture and commerce during the dawning of the Uni-Polar world after the fall of the Soviet Union, I think we can look back on the casual aspects of it with a wistful desire to return to those simpler times. I have a hard time believing the right angles and sterile cubes that dot the landscape today will persist as a celebrated aspect of society into the future. Imagine depositing modern tastes in architecture and art into the renaissance, thus extracting from the mind of Michelangelo the design of Pieta and replacing it with an amorphous blob or a simple geometric slab. In your mind, rebuild the Hagia Sophia with a Bauhaus edifice. It may not seem consequential, but cults meet in Morton steel buildings with garage doors and the pope sits on a golden throne in a marble palace. If you doubt the power of cheap American culture exported around the world, remember that the most famous photograph of the Great Pyramid is taken through the window of a Pizza Hut.

Ok, so perhaps you don't care about the aesthetics and branding of garbage food vendors because it's inconsequential and valueless. Is it possible the low-level ideas communicated by the form of a thing could, over time, compound into real, tangible changes in the composition of humanity? When Pizza Hut was Pizza Hut and Red Lobster was a dock-side shanty and McDonalds was a plastic playground with fries -- say around 1990 -- the obesity rate in the US was 12%. Today, it's 42%. Did making Taco Bell into an Ikea cabinet full of churros do that? Arguably, yes. Stick with me on this one... by making all of these places cookie cutter replicas of each other and removing the unique aesthetics, the only way to distinguish one place from the next was to normalize the offerings to cover more use-cases. What the hell does that mean? When these businesses were distinct, patronizing them was special and unique. Red Lobster was for special occasions, McDonalds was a treat, and Pizza Hut was earned through prolific literacy. As they all started being extruded from the same Play-Doh fun factory through a fast-casual restaurant-shaped hole, the only way to maintain profitability was to massively increase the rate at which their customers utilized their products. If there are 10 ctrl-c, ctrl-v calorie merchants within a square mile where there used to be 2, you need to serve 5 times the population, the same population 5 times as often, or some combination of that overly-simplified math. To achieve that reality, businesses expanded their menus to fit every conceivable use-case of every conceivable customer. First, they iterated on core products. The burger places came up with more types of burgers with a wide variety of configurations. The pizza places put in buffets and started hiding cheese in every possible nook and cranny. Chicken places went from fried to grilled to spicy to nuggets. When they exhausted the possibilities of their core products, they all jumped on the salad bandwagon. From there, they expanded into breakfast and late night, with some being open 24 hours. Hell, Taco Bell tried to normalize a "fourth meal" to squeeze out some more revenue. Today, it seems like every restaurant doubles as a coffee shop.

Of course, all of that takes money and effort, so to get the return on investment they expect, they dump a healthy portion of the budget into marketing. In 1990, 48% of Americans ate fast food at least once per week. Today, that's up to 83%. One third of Americans eat fast food on any given day, and that stat is weighted by heavy users of the product. By making all of these establishments identical in form, they've managed to normalize their function. If any conceivable act of consumption can be satisfied by every vendor of the product, the use of the produce becomes more ubiquitous because your exposure sensitivity to the act of patronage is lowered. At 7am, you can see hundreds of people from your community patronizing numerous gray rectangular prisms for breakfast sandwiches, donuts, coffee, cappuccino, lattes, macchiato's, breakfast burritos, smoothies, or açai bowls. The idea that it's perfectly normal to indulge in the breakfast class of foods from a plexiglass window is planted in the mind. Midday, you'll see double or triple the traffic lined up to those same drive through windows, thus normalizing the act for lunch. The same pattern repeats at dinner, followed by advertising messages reinforcing the observed behavior. The uniqueness of the experience has been tamped down in favor of ubiquity. They have abandoned selling an experience in favor of just having *something* to sell you at any given time of the day, any day of the week.

Despite the apparent success of this strategy, I hope there is room in the market for experiences. There's no need to try to recreate the experiences borne out of specific times and places; it would be enough to just decide on an experience you wish to deliver and then do so consistently and allow your customers to enjoy themselves and look forward to the experience again.

My wife and I discussed some of these ideas on our podcast. We recorded the episode on the drive home from Hillsboro. This podcast is available via $5 per month subscription, so if you'd like to listen to that conversation, click subscription at the top of the page and subscribe. Feel free to cancel after you've downloaded whatever you'd like, but this was a fairly satisfying discussion of how the dining and entertainment landscape has changed over the years. There is some adult language, as this is two adults having a candid conversation at 70mph on the highway.