Charlevoix — Every once in a while I see a picture of an old Pizza Hut appear somewhere on the internet. The booths, the salad bar, the stained glass lamps that hung over the tables, the plastic red glasses. Sometimes there’s a caption, sometimes there’s not. But almost every time there’s always a bunch of likes and comments.
If you want to get a lot of traction online, post some old photos of Pizza Hut. It’s almost a surefire path to a guaranteed “banger.” A hack in the collective subconscious of the internet. It’s funny. It’s so mundane and so unremarkable. This great engagement isn’t inspired by an ancient tomb or a grand cathedral. It’s a chain restaurant and free personal pan pizzas earned by reading a sufficient number of books as a part of the “Book It!” program.
Remember “Book It!”? Recall the feeling you got holding the certificate that entitled you to one free personal pan pizza. It was long and thin, almost the shape of a bookmark. Your teacher awarded them. She would write your name in cursive near the bottom and the date it. The anticipation that certificate brought was almost better than the final reward. Knowing that you weren’t subject to the whims of your parents who could easily say “We aren’t going out to eat tonight because we are on a budget” was thrilling. Remembering that you would not be sharing a large pizza with the rest of the family, but enjoying a personal pan pizza just for yourself, was a satisfying triumph of childhood.
Remember the kale that adorned the once great salad bar? That’s what it was by the way, if you didn’t know. Before we as a society decided to eat kale, Pizza Hut stuffed it in-between the buckets of lettuce, chopped-up hard boiled eggs, and bacon bits.
Remember the pizza buffet? All-you-can-eat pizza for $5.99. For a kid, this was heaven. Remember the stained glass chandeliers—yes we shall call them chandeliers—that hung over the tables? Dark red, and cream, Pizza Hut painted in ornate lettering. The brick walls and maroon carpeting. The smell from the kitchen. The glass shakers of parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes, the dark bubbling soda in a big red plastic glass, the deep booths, the soft lights, the hot grease pooled on warm mozzarella cheese.
This was the Pizza Hut of our youth.
It’s this that generates the guaranteed likes and comments. It’s this that anyone over a certain age loves to reminisce about. It’s these simple and mundane pleasures one felt, the warm memories one remembers. It doesn’t matter that it’s not grand or ancient. Nostalgia is like home. It’s not often the spectacular but rather the simple and the close.
We all have a physical childhood home. That’s the place we lived. We all have a time-based childhood home. That’s the era we were born into. The nostalgia we feel for the old Pizza Hut is a nostalgia for the time in which we were born. It’s a nostalgia for something deeper transposed onto something simpler. It’s a longing for a place and time (home) that doesn’t exist anymore.
They’ve updated the Pizza Huts a lot since our childhood. These days they are cooler and colder, sleeker and more futuristic. They, like almost all rebrands in our day and age, are soulless and space-age. They reflect a general thrust of our time. Dehumanization, cold synthetic efficiency, non-committal gray and black. That’s the name of the game today.
Our general nostalgia is getting closer in the rearview mirror. We are reminiscing times that are nearer and nearer. Soon, we might be dreamily remembering 2019 and calling them the good old days. It wasn’t always like this, and hopefully it won’t always be. There were decades where no one wanted to return to anything at all. There were times of very little nostalgia. They were years which held promise. Eras in which people felt optimistic and content with the current reality. You don’t miss the past if the present is better.
But there’s a sense among people that our present isn’t better, or that it isn’t better in the ways we would like it to be. That’s why Pizza Hut nostalgia lingers. It’s a desperate grasping for anything that reminds us of the warmer, brighter, more optimistic world of our youth. In an era of terrifying technology marching us toward a disorienting AI false-reality, cold metal chairs in bare dining rooms that remind us of prison cafeterias, self-order kiosks and faceless customer service, those soft booths, warm lights, red cups, and free personal pan pizzas feel like a strange oasis of humanity.
That oasis of humanity still lingers in the pixelated photos from the late 1990s that appear on the internet from time to time. Believe it or not, there are still a few old Pizza Huts left standing in our fallen world. They are relics among the ruins. One of these old masters is up north in Charlevoix. The sign in front refers to itself as “Pizza Hut Classic.” You pass it on your way into town from the south. It’s got the same roof as it always did. The red triangle with a flat top. You can’t miss it.
We go there sometimes with our kids. They love it. Probably because they love pizza and they love going out to eat like all kids do. But they also like the other stuff too. They like that it feels different there. That it embraces an aesthetic that isn’t anywhere else. It’s not just my kids either. When discussing family trips, a friend who visits the area every summer told me, unprompted, that his kids love going to the Pizza Hut in Charlevoix. It’s classic kid behavior: liking the restaurant more than the picturesque destination. The kids aren’t wrong: The old Pizza Hut was better. They don’t have the nostalgia to tell them, but they know it when they are there.
It’s not all bad. Pizza Hut still has the Book It! program. You can even do it if you are homeschooled like my kids are. My kids do it, and love it. In Charlevoix, at the old relic, they sit under the warm stained glass lamps just like I did when I was a kid. They draw with crayons, play tic-tac-toe, and look around at everything that’s different because we don’t give them iPads while we wait.
They’ve got a funny and beautiful childhood I think. Living a little in another time—a better time—and not knowing any different, redeeming their Book It! reward for their own personal pan pizza at the old Pizza Hut that reminds us all of the world before it was gray and black.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @OW_Root.
