Everyone knows that the winner of the Olympic decathlon gets to carry the title "Greatest Athlete in the World' for the next four years. It's frequently not true, especially over the last 25 years or so, when damn near half the time it was actually a woman who was the greatest athlete in the world. [1] But women don't compete in the decathlon, so they don't get that title.

Anyway, when I was coming up, my big hero, and the greatest decathlete around was Daley Thompson, [2] a Brit who won the gold in 1980 and 1984, and made waves in ‘86 by refusing to wear his team's shirt because it had a Guinness Beer logo on it, and he didn't think athletes should be spokesmen for alcohol.

I love Guinness. Hell, I love alcohol in most of its incarnations. But I also sure loved and admired Daley Thompson, even though the big treat he would occasionally allow himself was a glass half filled with Diet Coke and half filled with water, and even though he certainly never ate pizza. He just trained for, competed in, and excelled at 10 different events in track and field.

Likewise, Pizza Hut competes in an endeavor that, to my mind, is every bit as important as running, jumping and thing-throwing: They deliver pizza. And if the competition was to see who could get the most things wrong in the various pizza making and delivering events, Pizza Hut would win the gold in unprecedented fashion. They are the Daley Thompson of suck.

Customer Service

TAKING THE ORDER: Look, I'm not one of those people who thinks that you should be denied a job or the right to vote if you're ESL., but for cryin' out loud, you shouldn't be manning the phones at a delivery place if you haven't mastered at least one language. I'm not even asking it to be English. Just basic communication skills in some recognized dialect would be nice. Pizza Hut does not seem to have grasped the importance of the order-taking function, and places their least able communicators on the phone.

DELIVERY TIME: This is about the only event in which Pizza Hut scores just half of the crappy points allowable. They tell you it's going to be 45 minutes, and they're likely to be there in somewhere around 45 minutes. My most recent pizza got here in 52 minutes, which is close enough to 45, I guess. But they still earn crappy points by taking 45 minutes in the first place. It's a goddamned pre-made crust and you're 8 blocks away. There's no reason you can't get in done in the half-hour that Domino's gets in done in ... and Domino's at least rolls out it's crust on the premises.

GETTING IT RIGHT: So yeah, if I order a Meat Lovers Pizza, I get a Meat Lovers Pizza. At least so far. So you're not completely butt-stupid. But I have yet to ever – ever – get the peppers and parm on the side I always ask for.

The Food

CRUST: The basic crust on a Pizza Hut pizza is just strange and bad in so many ways. First, it's spongy, as I suppose it needs to be, since it would be inconceivable for the cardboard box alone to soak up the vast quantities of grease rendered from almost all of the toppings. Boboli would be a huge step up. On the other hand, you can do even worse than the crust that comes with their regular pizza. For instance, you could get their Thin'n Crispy, which is surely just a giant Tortilla., or their Double Crust, which is two tortillas with cheese in the middle and pizza stuff on top. So you get a bad quesadilla and a bad pizza in one. Or you could get the stuffed crust, which ... ah nevermind, the stuffed crust is cool.

The crusts are also freakish in that they are a perfect circle. Crust does not exist in nature that is a perfect circle. Hence, this crust cannot be trusted.

CHEESE: I'm not convinced that any of the grease soaking into the regular crust comes from the cheese, because I'm not convinced that Pizza Hut uses cheese. Whatever it is, the product doesn't so much melt as, I don't know, soften. It won't stretch, or hold heat, or bubble or any of the other things a cheese ought to do. It just seems to have given up, like Kathleen Turner.

SAUCE: Pizza Hut sauce is dreadful. Pizza sauce should not be sweet, dammit. No tomato sauce should be sweet, and if it is, it's because you're trying to hide the lack of basil and oregano and garlic and onion and bell pepper and any of the other things that ought to flavor even a semi-respectable sauce. Plus, Pizza Hut uses too much of it, causing improper slidage.

TOPPINGS: Pizza Hut claims to offer as toppings sausage, beef and pork, but I challenge anyone to point out the difference among these. All three are indistinguishable rabbit-pellet looking things, each with the same gelatinous texture and faint hint of beef lips and fennel. Likewise, the pepperoni has none of the signs of legitimate pepperoni, besides circularity. No spice, no tartness, no ability to obtain crispness when heat is applied.

Worse, if you order a pizza with a number of toppings, Pizza Hut does that thing where they give you proportionately less of each topping the more toppings you order. This drives me nuts. If I pay a buck for like 15 slices of pepperoni-reminiscent food-product, or a buck for 25 sausage pellets, why should 2 bucks get me only 10 pepperoni slices and 15 pellets?

The Deal

The large pizza appears to be about 13 inches, an insulting size to label "large." Even Domino's, which calls it's small pizza "medium", since they only offer 2 sizes, has the good sense to hand over 16" of almost-goodness under the heading "large." That's industry standard baby. Don't be giving me 13 inches and calling it large unless you're God and you're talking about my dick. Thirteen inches is a medium with a thyroid condition. And it shouldn't cost more than nine-and-a-half bucks.

Pizza hut also charges a buck-fiddy for delivery.

So if a Pizza Hut large pizza is really a medium, and a 3 topping pizza is really kind of a one-and-a-half variety-pack topping, it should cost, at most around eleven/eleven-and-a-half bucks. And that's close. With a coupon, you can get this pizza from Pizza Hut for $11.99. But don't forget to add in that delivery charge. So, $13.50. Congratulations, you've just paid more money for less pizza at the poorest quality available than almost anywhere else you could order from.

Conclusion

To be fair, I have had worse pizza. In college, there was a place near me called 2-for-1 Pizza, where you could lie and tell ‘em you had a coupon for 3-for-1 and they would bring you three different pies with a topping apiece for only $9.00. The pizza's were essentially indistinguishable in taste from the box, but at 3 bucks, it left me and my 2 room-mates enough extra cash to buy a 40 oz. King Cobra or two, so we didn't really care what it tasted like. So there ya go, Pizza Hut is only the second worst pizza on earth.


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[1] Hello Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

[2] Bruce Jenner was a mullet-headed freak on a leash.

Recommended: No