By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
When Pizza Hut opened its first Buffalo-area location on Niagara Falls Boulevard just north of Maple Road in 1969, there were only 62 pizza joints in Buffalo. Thirty years later, there were nearly 300 pizza places – and 35 Pizza Hut locations in Erie and Niagara Counties.
It might not be “Buffalo pizza,” but we Buffalonians have been eating it for longer than many of our most beloved pizza places have been in business.
The food wasn’t the big appeal – grandmas, for some reason, seemed to appreciate the service and décor that didn’t necessarily come with most corner takeout pizzerias.
An ad for Western New York’s first Pizza Hut.
Plenty of Western New Yorkers have memories of family parties set in that low-light dining room with brick and checked tablecloth décor, with pitchers of pop and red plastic glasses, and bubbling pizzas hot enough to cause burns that would take months to heal.
Through the ’80s and ’90s, even more of us remember completing (or saying we completed) our summer reading to get a coupon for a personal pan pizza – which came out still in the cast iron pan, hotter than the surface of the sun. The Book It! program made many of us Pizza Hut fans even if the neighborhood pie place was still our favorite.
Of course, despite the fact that Pizza Hut was in Buffalo for more than 50 years, there have always been those who can’t see beyond the fact that the restaurants are part of a national chain.
Their arguments are bolstered by incidents such as the one in 1995, when News Food Editor Janice Okun had to explain to Pizza Hut’s public relations man, “a real wing tenderfoot,” how chicken wings became known as “Buffalo wings,” as they began trying to sell the “electric red” baked wings in the Western New York market.
1979 Pizza Hut Phone Book Listing
There have also been times when Pizza Hut has been ahead of the times – sometimes too far ahead.
In 1994, The News shared the announcement that Pizza Hut “will use the information superhighway to let PC fanatics order home pizza deliveries on the Internet, the global web of networks.”
Twenty-six years ago, Buffalonians knew ordering pizza – but didn’t know “world wide web,” as the story went on to explain that “The Internet is the largest electronic network linking computers, and as many as 20 million people on the network communicate through a web of host computers around the world.”
1999 Pizza Hut Phone Book Listing
In 2003, Pizza Hut expected to sell 7,000 pizzas in Buffalo on Super Bowl Sunday.
Five years later, however, a spokesman told News Reporter Samantha Christmann that a few of the area stores hadn’t made money in years – or even decades – as seven local Pizza Hut locations were closed.
“These have been chronic losers, some of them for over 20 years,” said Walt Ruta, director of operations for Hospitality West LLC, which owned 31 Pizza Huts in Buffalo before the closure.
Earlier this month, it was announced the remaining 17 Pizza Hut locations in the Buffalo area would be closed permanently – after closing temporarily because of the Covid-19 outbreak.
It’s the first time in more than a half-century that Pizza Hut won’t be “makin’ it great” in Western New York.
