Pizza Hut, and why casual restaurants are failing to earn their crust

The demise of 68 Pizza Hut restaurants has elicited nostalgia, and no small amount of hand-wringing over the future of the stalwarts of the UK’s casual dining scene.

The wave of closures will leave just 64 of Pizza Hut’s red-topped restaurants standing in the UK, but not everyone is sad to see the chain’s woes.

‘Never very good’

“Let it die,” said Angus Colwell in The Telegraph, because “from the very start”, it’s “always been a strange thing” that “didn’t know what it was: a nice environment to have a pizza in with the family, or an adequate hangover-rescue service”. It “tried to straddle the two” and “it failed”.

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The chain is a “legacy of those darker days” when we were happy to “consume whichever fast food had the best ads”, so its demise is a “sign of cultural maturity”, proof that we’re a “nation that now has a higher standard for food” and that we’re “less forgiving of the mediocre”.

Pizza Hut was “never very good”, said Alexander Larman on The Spectator. It was “too expensive and fancy” for diners who wanted a Domino’s or Papa Johns, “not middle-class enough” for the Pizza Express “habitués” and its pizzas can’t “compete with the new vogue” for “Neapolitan thick-crusted delights” that arrived with Franco Manca.

‘More than places to eat’

Pizza Hut has struggled to remain relevant amid increased competition, having initially been at the “forefront” of the fast food market in the 1970s, Zoë Adjey, a senior lecturer in hospitality at the University of East London, told the BBC.

“The pizza market has become a lot more upmarket,” she said. “There’s a lot more high-end pizza and they’ve taken a huge market share.”

But “it’s not just devotees of the Hawaiian Sizzler that should be worried”, said James Moore in The Independent, because “when such a stalwart succumbs to financial pressures”, it shows the “precarious state of Britain’s mid-market dining sector”. If Pizza Hut is “struggling”, it’s bad news for all the “casual, affordable restaurants that once formed the backbone of our eating-out culture”.

Restaurants are “more than places to eat, they are how we connect as people”. So “saving them will take more than nostalgia or mockery”, it will require "fairer business rates, support for training, and an honest reckoning with the real cost of feeding a nation”.