Remembering Pizza Hut’s Priazzo Italian Pie

Growing up, there was no fancier place to eat than Pizza Hut. With their fancy decor — light fixtures, checkered tablecloths, snug little booths, brick façades — the Pizza Huts of my youth were the epitome of fine dining, and they were never finer than when they offered the Priazzo.

If you were born after the early ’90s, then you’ve probably never heard of the Priazzo. For you, the height of Pizza Hut’s culinary prowess is more likely their stuffed crust pizza, or perhaps the “Triple Deckeroni” or “Big Italy” pizza. But the Priazzo, which officially rolled out in June 1985, was essentially the franchise’s take on a stuffed pizza pie. From The Retroist’s extensive Priazzo history:

Inspired by rustic Italian pies, they would take a pan and lay a pizza dough inside it. Then they would fill the crust with ingredients. Which ingredients depended on the variation you bought. After that, they would top it off with another layer of pizza [dough], which they would layer with sauce and cheese.

There was something particularly exotic about the notion of a pizza pie to my young mind, and I would beg my parents to order a Priazzo whenever we ventured out to Pizza Hut for dinner. Several types were available, but if memory serves, we always ordered the Roma, which was packed with pepperoni, sausage, beef, mushrooms, onions, and a pound of cheddar and mozzarella cheese (as seen in the commercial above).

Suffice to say, the Priazzo was quite the meal. But Pizza Hut discontinued the dish in the early ’90s, most likely due to the time and complexity involved in making it. As The Retroist notes in the aforelinked article, it could take up to 40 minutes to produce and serve a single Priazzo pie, an eternity compared to the time necessary for a normal deep dish pizza, and that ate into Pizza Hut’s margins.

Unfortunately, once the novelty of a new product wore off, they had to count on people who regularly ate at Pizza Hut. They were not going in and ordering MORE food, they were ordering a Priazzo INSTEAD of what they normally ordered.

So they were just taking away purchases from an existing product. One that was probably a lot easier and cheaper to make.

More than 30+ years later, the Priazzo still has ardent admirers on Reddit and Facebook, all of whom wax nostalgically about the dish (both eating and making it). “I was 14 at the time, but my one taste was seared into my mind as being truly delicious and amazing!,” writes one Redditor, while others hold up the Priazzo as proof that Pizza Hut was far better back in the day.

Was Pizza Hut really better back in the late ’80s and early ’90s? And if the franchise suddenly brought back the Priazzo today, would it still be as good as my inner twelve-year-old remembers? Nostalgia is always a tricky thing. But I must say, it rarely makes my stomach growl this much.