New style Pizza Hut causes stir on Strand
PIZZA Hut, that bastion of teenage dining, has unveiled plans to win back the hipster generation – by serving cocktails.
Yep, from now on you can sip a Southern Punch as you chow down on your Texas Meat Meltdown, or a hard milkshake for dessert, after the chain announced plans to spend £1.67m on a major revamp and redesign.
Pizza Hut on The Strand became the first to unveil its new look last week, which cost £500,000 and comes complete with oak flooring, red leather banquettes and an open kitchen.
As well as new bar areas, the menu has also been given a rejig, with fries and Kentucky Style BBQ Ribs, among things added to the menu for the first time.
Apparently trials of the rejigged restaurants have already caused sales to jump 35 per cent. Images even emerged of queues outside the Strand restaurant, with people camping through the night to be the first through the doors.
Mike Spencer, Pizza Hut’s operations director, said: “In the eighties we were the only show in town in pizza, now we’re not. A lot of people came as young children but moved on to places like Pizza Express when they grew up and never came back to us. We want to make Pizza Hut relevant to those young adults.”
As part of the grand unveiling of the new look, guests were given the opportunity to partake in Pizza Hut’s Subconscious Menu, which the company claims intuitively recognisers what the customer really wants, by monitoring their retina movements over a digital menu, seeing what their eyes linger over for the longest.
Pizza Hut’s subconscious menu features 20 ingredients, which mean a pizza has a possible 4,896 potential combinations. Gnom gnom.