Category: Restaurants: casual dining, take-away. Score 11.5/20 (Full breakdown below and score explained. Venues are compared with similar venues and measured against the best examples in their category.)
The sight of it, wrapped in dough and covered in cheese was just that bit too much like when my dog covers up its waste by kicking up some turf.
Two wide-eyed, excitable under fives shot past us to the ice cream factory while the real life embodiment of Angelica from the Rugrats picked up an entire 13” pepperoni pizza and airlifted it into her gob whilst her mother looked on in despair.
Pizza Hut, Trafford Retail Park
With E-numbers in the air and bits of pizza splattered everywhere, as Chris put it, "When you’re a kid, coming here is heaven.”
For two adults however, Pizza Hut is less life changing.
The all-you-can-eat buffet can be handy I guess, but overall there’s never a time when Pizza Hut is top of the list. A bottomless trip to the Ice Cream Factory doesn’t entice me not being seven and all, and on the whole I find their pizzas utterly average.
To be honest, Pizza Hut would have to do something wacky like squeezing mini burgers into the crust of their pizza and calling it ‘all the fun without the bun’ to get my attention.
Oh, hang on a minute...
Pizza crust has been unashamedly whored around the junk food scene for a while now. It all started with Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust pizza in 1995. This gave the company record sales. Subsequently we've had cheesy bites crust, hot dog stuffed crust with or without mustard and now, the cheeseburger stuffed crust pizza. Basically if it’s edible, it can be encrusted and served up in a deep pan.
The cheeseburger crust is available on any large pizza, but the Pizza Hut menu recommended we team it with one of their meatiest pizzas: ‘Supreme, Meat Feast or Double Pepperoni’, because ten cheese burgers between two of us is simply not enough meat. We went for the Supreme (£17.45).
In addition, we could add ‘BBQ Chicken Wings or Potato Wedges Plus Ultimate Garlic Bread for only £5’ because 2,800 calories on the pizza alone is clearly not enough. Two Stella Artois for an extra £5 was also recommended on the same menu, presumably to kill us off.
Then came the news we’d been waiting for – with that gluttonous order, we’d get a free trip to the salad bar each. There was hope for my gut yet.
Pizza Hut Salad Bar Bowl
To be fair to Pizza Hut, I haven’t a bad word to say about the service or the sides for that matter. The staff were attentive, polite and funny. The chicken wings were some of the most moist, sticky sweet little gems I’ve had in a while and there’s something about piling my own salad bowl as high as possible that will always make me feel extra smug.
Despite being stuck in The Fun House, we never felt like we were imposing on a kid’s party either. Pizza Hut has learned to handle its zany demographic well, but it’s a shame the same can’t be said for their latest meddling with crusts.
Pizza Hut should rename themselves Chicken Wing Hut
The pizza arrived looking better than the promotional image but still strangely infected and it wasn’t just the burgers that were to blame.
The toppings, aside from the peppers, looked like plastic toy food stolen from ‘My First Kitchen’ and being someone who favours a margarita the recommended ‘Supreme’ selection of toppings featuring chicken, pepperoni, mince beef as well as the ten mini burgers was simply a barbaric amount of meat for one sitting.
A cheeseburger? In a pizza?
Pizza Hut Or My First KitchenI managed one burger but the sight of it, wrapped in dough and covered in cheese, was just that bit too much like when my dog covers up its waste by kicking up some turf. Dogs apparently do this so that an enemy does not find them from the scent. Likewise, I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to find this either.
The burgers were lightly spiced and tasted a lot more like an Ikea meatball than a burger. Eating them after all that pizza dough and topping felt very, very wrong and it wasn’t long before I was playing with my food like the rest of the Pizza Hut clientele and day dreaming of the ice cream factory, which was fast looking like a health sanctuary.
John Dalton's tastier eyesExtracting the burger from its crusty cocoon and peeling off the rubbery cheese, I sent the life-less, caption-less iPhone image below to my editor.
He replied: ‘John Dalton, the Manchester based boffin who discovered colour blindness and helped develop the atomic theory, had his eyes preserved for science. They are currently on temporary display at John Rylands Library. 169 years after his death they look tastier than that burger.’
This is not John Dalton's eye
Chris, who last week rated the 'KFC mighty bucket for one' as his junk food favourite of 2013, agreed, saying: “I wouldn’t even eat this if I’d been on a wild night out. It's madness.”
Chris takes a biteYou see it’s not a case of berating food that’s cheap and doesn’t come drizzled with ‘jus’. Junk food has its place but it too has its limits and for me, Pizza Hut has gone too far with this one.
I like pizzas and I like burgers, but the fact remains, there’s nothing I want less at the end of each slice of pizza than a burger. It just doesn’t work.
Tell a lie actually. Having researched crusts, I came across this tremendous article on jest.com which profiles the nine most ridiculous stuffed crust pizzas in the world.
In no particular order there’s mayo-filled shrimp stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut Japan, buffalo wings stuffed crust pizza from the Philadelphia City Paper, Nutella stuffed crust pizza from 'an amateur who's clearly doing God's work', bacon, sausage and cheese stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut Japan, cream cheese stuffed crust pizza from New England Pizza Company and cheese and mashed sweet potatoes stuffed crust pizza from Domino's Korea.
Suddenly John Dalton’s eyes don’t seem like such a bad idea after all?
You can follow Lynda on Twitter @lyndamoyo
Have you tried the Pizza Hut Cheeseburger pizza? We want to know what you thought of it...
ALL SCORED CONFIDENTIAL REVIEWS ARE IMPARTIAL AND PAID FOR BY THE MAGAZINE.
Pizza Hut, Trafford Retail Park, Neary Way, Urmston, Manchester. 0161 749 4950.
Food: 4/10 (chicken wings 8, wedges 6, salad 3, that pizza 1)
Service: 4.5/5
Ambience: 3/5
