Red roof Pizza Hut locations taste like nostalgia, and a cure for the DoorDash blues. What’s crazy, is that even the corporation that owns Pizza Hut doesn’t even know how many of these locations still exist.
Once a common sight across the country, these old-school, low-slung buildings had largely disappeared as the restaurant chain modernized its stores and focused on takeout. Mr. Pujol, a journalist who documents retro American highway culture, says he “freaked out,” and swerved into the parking lot.
He had not discovered an abandoned relic from the Reagan era. As a plaque near the door explained, this restaurant in Tunkhannock, Pa., was a Pizza Hut Classic. The interior design and menu had been painstakingly engineered to replicate the Pizza Huts of the 1980s and ’90s, when families and friends settled into red-vinyl booths on a Friday night to eat deep-dish pan pizza and drink Pepsi from red plastic cups.