Darren W.
Yelp
Note: This Pizza Hut also sells Wing Street items.
There were a couple of Pizza Huts in the South Hills of Pittsburgh that our family frequented on occasion during my childhood. It was a special treat back in the days when PH didn't deliver. Your pizza would come to you in that cast iron pan with a clip holding it in place. Beverages came in a pitcher for the table to share. A cocktail cabinet arcade machine sat in the corner. Pizza Hut pizza was fluffy, bulging, and had a greasy, crispy bottom you didn't mind. It was almost like a biscuit or English Muffin with cheese and tomato sauce on it.
Then they started delivering. One opened nearby that offered no dine-in. Over time we grew tired of it.
Really selling out, they went into full-on fast food mode, starting up restaurants in Downtown Pittsburgh that only sold the Objectivist menu item known as the Personal Pan Pizza.
I went on to work at one for a cup of joe at the long-demolished Three Rivers Stadium and that would be it, my relationship with PH souring forever after I realized that there was nothing to "making" a PH pie other than ripping it out of a plastic sheath and placing it onto a track oven.
Kay wanted stuffed crust pizza and had been wanting it for months. Without an idea on where to eat prior to our Pittsburgh Mills Odyssey, I brought her here as a safe, cheap bet.
I lied. A Stuffed Crust Pizza, some Wing Street potato skins, and a dessert of Hershey's Chocolate Dunkers ran us up to $25!
The cheese inside the crust, the SCP's main draw, tasted like it came out of Home Depot and was used to caulk windows. The crust and everything else on it was as pre-fab as a Bath Fitter.
The potato skins were a hoarder's apartment on a plate; toppings of tomato, bacon, sour cream, and cheese were strewn all about, effectively burying the taters under mounds of frozen, rubbery detritus.
The dunkers? Microwave-borne clunkers
The nearby Wal-Mart? Supplier and enabler.
Pizza Hut is the parent-approved kid you played with in elementary school who got weird in 8th grade, falling in with a bunch of dopers and delinquents, causing you to avoid him for many years. When you finally catch up with him after a decade and a half, you find out that he now works for Amway and belongs to an evangelical mega-church, which now gives you all-new, all-different reasons to avoid him.