Another Mostly Bad Pizza Hut Experience

Known for its poor service and filthy tables

Last time it was bad delivery service.  This time it was a combination of a filthy dining area and poor dining-in service ... during lunch hour, nonetheless.

Connie and I decided on a whim to have lunch on Thursday at the Pizza Hut at 15th Street and Walton Way, near Augusta's medical complex, since we were in the area.  What drew us was memories of Pizza Hut lunchtime buffets from years gone by ... and in other places.  What we experienced confirmed in our minds that those days are probably gone forever.

The place was filthy.  The service was terrible.  The pizza was, surprisingly, when they actually had some out on the serving line, pretty good.

Another thing that surprised us was that they had a lot of customers.

To start with, we weren't greeting by a hostess.  She was, if you could call her a hostess, busy about he dining room, mostly talking to guests and clearing tables.  We met her near the buffet line, between the pizzas and the salad.  We wanted a booth.  There was one available, but it hadn't been cleaned yet.  Of course, it was lunchtime, and the place was busy, but the hostess had time to shoot the breeze with some of the clientele.  She said we could have the booth and it would take her just a second to have it ready.

We observed that "just a second" meant that all she did to make the table ready was to remove the debris from it and sop it down with her soaking wet, nasty dish rag.  It took me about four paper towel napkins to get dry it enough to put elbows on it.  Connie noticed the floor right away ... reminded her of the North Leg Family Restaurant which burned down last summer.  If you stood still for too long in one spot, your feet sort of got stuck.  Then, once we sat down to eat, we noticed the grease and grime on the window blinds, and places on them where small children with food on their hands had wiped their fingers on them.  In fact, the whole interior of the place seemed coated with a film of grease.

Since it was lunchtime, there was constant traffic between the tables and the buffet line.  But the traffic was congested.  And the reason why was because there was hardly any pizza on the line.  We heard one gentleman say to his friend, "You'd think a pizza joint would at least have some pepperoni slices out on the line during the lunch rush."  When I went back for seconds, there were only two slices of anything on the whole line.  People were standing at the line staring back at the kitchen. There were five or six people back there only one of whom seemed to actually be working ... or working like he cared.

The lady bringing clean dishes to the line wore plastic gloves, but the cooks back there putting toppings on the pizzas used no gloves at all.  The guy back there actually working was also running the cash register up front.  Back and forth he kept running, checking out customers standing in line to pay, then rushing back to kitchen to take something out of the oven.  He handled cash with his bare hands, then handled food in the same way.

All around us we heard customers muttering about the slowness of the cooks to get food up to the line.  But most people didn't seem to mind the filthiness of the place, or the loudmouthed hostess who took her time cleaning tables with her greasy, sopping wet, should-have-been-washed-yesterday bar towel, or the foot-dragging kitchen help bringing up plates and silverware.

Maybe that's because, despite everything, the pizza--once they got some--actually tasted pretty good.

But that wasn't enough to make Connie and me ever want to go back there again.