Diner Hut

Truly splendid. Wonderful stories told in the inimitable Lileks fashion. I have been on your side of the extra sauce battle. I won. I cheated. My daughter worked at PJs for a summer. I always went to collect the pie, rather than have it delivered by the suicide bombers they had driving for them. When she saw me approach, she pushed aside whoever was on the bench assembling pies, got down a crust and slapped two healthy ladles of red stuff on it. Then she handed it off to the other peon to finish, and came over to the register to take my order. She has always taken good care of her old man. Thank you for helping those memories float to the surface. Now I'm hungry.

The full service sit down restaurants remaining are branded as Pizza Hut Classic. There's someone on the web who has compiled a list. (There's always a guy on the web...) In fact, there's one exactly 13 1/2 miles from my house. I kid you not. I put it in two different map apps just to make sure.

We drive a particular route across west Texas several times a year to visit family. At the side of the road in one of the small towns along the route is a building that has been vacant for years, is currently painted bright yellow, but clearly had been built to be a Pizza Hut. Unmistakable shape and design features.

In another town there's a Chinese restaurant in a building whose architecture makes clear it previously was a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.

A long time ago I did some legal work for the Carl's Jr. chain. At the time all outlets were company owned (no franchisees). To preserve capital, they leased rather than owned, the buildings that were built to their specifications to house their restaurants, so when leases ended, they ensured that the distinctive architectural features of the building were removed or modified (especially the roof shape) so that it was impossible to tell the building had previously housed a Carl's Jr.

EJHill (View Comment):

In fact, there’s one exactly 13 1/2 miles from my house. I kid you not. I put it in two different map apps just to make sure.

That’s quite a coincidence. So I put the local Pizza Hooch into my iPhone Maps and it tells me it’s 13 minutes away—by bicycle. I’ll take it easy and call it 13 and a half.

At the risk of enraging Mr. Lileks, I do not consider red sauce to be essential to pizza, although I usually get my pizza with it. But I also like a white pizza with sausage and anchovies.

But as he said in his talk, one of the wonders of "pizza" in America is the enormous variety that is available, such that almost everyone can find his personal preference.

That wide variety of preferences explains for me why the U.S. pizza market is dominated by local shops and small regional chains, and even the biggest national chains cumulatively account for only a small portion of the total pizza business in the United States.