Nearly 40 Pizza Hut locations across the country have returned to the restaurant’s iconic vintage vibes and customers are overjoyed.
Kansas-based Daland Corporation runs 93 of the locations and has brought back the classic red cups, salad bar, checkered tables, and lamps from the 1980s and 1990s to 38 of its locations, calling those restaurants “Pizza Hut Classic,” Fox News reported Friday.
Daland president Tim Sparks said his own family enjoyed sharing a meal at Pizza Hut years ago and he hopes the remodels will encourage other people to eat there again.
“It’s a good time to start having dinner together,” he commented, adding feedback has been quite positive. “Everybody gets super excited. There’s a lot of feel-good to it for sure.”
The Fox article noted the remodeled locations “include promotional materials for the ‘Book It!’ program the chain established in 1984 and still runs to incentivize children to read more by rewarding them with pizza.”
The excitement over the vintage revival comes after Pizza Hut’s parent company planned to shut down 250 underperforming U.S. locations, Breitbart News reported in February.
Sparks’ team has been working for the past six years to remodel the locations, and finding the Tiffany-style lampshades proved to be difficult, according to USA Today.
“We use Amazon to find the table arrangers and battery operated candles. Originally, Pizza Hut had a vendor making the Tiffany-style lamp shades but because they required a minimum order of 500 they ended the relationship. I was not involved in that process as I would have bought 500!” he told the outlet.
Video footage showed Sparks taking a reporter on a tour of a Pizza Hut Classic location in Pennsylvania. “When you finally find something that tastes how you genuinely remember it tasting, you can’t let it go,” one customer said.
Sparks said customers have driven from hours away to have pizza inside one of the restaurants. Part of his mission is to bring families together.
“If we can get them in here as a family, they do tend to put their phones down and actually have conversations and speak with each other. I’m not going to tell you I know how to fix the world, but I do think that family is a good place to start,” he stated.
Pizza Hut was born in 1958 when two brothers borrowed $600 from their mother to open a pizza restaurant in Wichita, Kansas, according to the company’s website.
“They named it Pizza Hut, because their sign only had room for eight letters. How profound!” the site read.
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