Posted on 01/05/2026 6:44:58 PM PST by logi_cal869
The restaurant industry is trying to figure out whether America has hit peak pizza.
Once the second-most common U.S. restaurant type, pizzerias are now outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican food eateries, according to industry data. Sales growth at pizza restaurants has lagged behind the broader fast-food market for years, and the outlook ahead isn’t much brighter.
“Pizza is disrupted right now,” Ravi Thanawala, chief financial officer and North America president at Papa John’s International, said in an interview. “That’s what the consumer tells us.”
The parent of the Pieology Pizzeria chain filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December. Others, including the parent of Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza & Wings and Bertucci’s Brick Oven Pizza & Pasta, earlier filed for bankruptcy.
Pizza once was a novelty outside big U.S. cities, providing room for growth for independent shops and then chains such as Pizza Hut with its red roof dine-in restaurants. Purpose-made cardboard boxes and fleets of delivery drivers helped make pizza a takeout staple for those seeking low-stress meals.
Today, pizza shops are engaged in price wars with one another and other kinds of fast food. Food-delivery apps have put a wider range of cuisines and options at Americans’ fingertips. And $20 a pie for a family can feel expensive compared with $5 fast-food deals, frozen pizzas or eating a home-cooked meal.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Worse, my own experience demonstrates a serious pattern of both low expectations by the public and disconnect from reality by nearly every pizza place I've encountered. And that includes the likes of Pizza Hut, Dominoes, etc., including a plethora of locally owned pizzerias offering a broad spectrum of specialty variations of the cuisine, none of which are hardly similar except for the shape of the final product, fragmenting the larger pizza demographic into specialty groups chasing their own tastes. Variety? Yes. Quality? I would challenge any such assertion in over 95% of stores.
I cook, but I do enjoy being served a good meal. Therein lies the problem: Lousy ingredients, poor service and high prices have definitely come to pizza. The article cites "$20 pizza" but if you're not talking about the crap from the big chains, the reality is $40-50 large pies. 20 years ago, the best pizza was a local Italian restaurant...a TRUE Italian restaurant. Then the owners retired and a 20-year hunt for a similar pizza has been a long, expensive and frustrating endeavor.
I make my own pizza now atop a fermented dough that takes >2 days to prepare (term, not time) and anyone who's had my pizza both finds homemade superior & understands my argument loosely posed here, coupled with my belief that pizza is a healthy food options when healthy choices precede consumption.
I think the article demonstrates a serious disconnect from reality by those who seek to control the industry and small, independent pizzerias have supplanted a field once dominated by the national chains.
To be more accurate, America has fallen out of love with corporate food, in this case pizza (and don't get me started on faux Italian eateries, not to be confused with American pizzerias).
What say you?
Fast food pizza (Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Dominoes, Little Caesars, etc.) is crap compared to what it used to be.
Many frozen store bought pizzas are better tasting.
We miss sit down pizza places like Pizza Hut.
The customer service is so good where we purchase pizza once a month for family game night, that we wouldn’t change to a chain. Happens to be a convenience store at a campground. I don’t eat it because it is so heavy, but they do have gluten free.
It’s Ozempic, obviously.
I love pizza. I adore it. Oddly, I can find a way to enjoy even bad pizza! But I get nearly ecstatic over good pizza. And after all these years, I finally learned to make my own that is as good as any I have eaten anywhere.
To be fair-I prefer my pizza deadly simple, without a lot of toppings. Here is what I do. (I don’t make my own dough yet, but there is a store-bought artisan dough at Market Basket that is very serviceable, and is quite as good as 85% of the crust I have eaten out there.)
Put a pizza stone into the middle of the oven and preheat as high as you can go. Mine goes up to 500. I usually let it pre-heat for an hour.
Shape dough into a disk on a floured surface then pick it up on your knuckles and move it into the classic shape.
Cornmeal the peel and lay the dough on.
In a bowl, whisk together olive oil, garlic (I use the paste) black pepper and oregano, then brush the entire dough with it right out to the edge. I brush as far as I can go, and be sure that none will drip down onto the peel.
Take mixed Romano and Parmesan grated cheese and sprinkle liberally. Make EXTRA sure to get some of that on the very edge of the thicker crust where there will be no topping.
Take fresh mozzarella slice it into thin disks as thin as it will let you (which is not too thin) but it is no big deal if it breaks up into pieces-it is better if it does, and you spread the mozzarella a bit sparsely over the dough out to the thicker edge but not on it.
The main purpose of the mozzarella at this stage here is to serve as a base to hold the pizza ingredients together when cutting and eating.
Get a lot of fresh basil-dried basil is absolutely worthless even as an emergency measure-I usually have at least 12 medium sized fresh leaves, stalks discarded, and I stack them into a stack with decreasing leaf size as you stack, then roll them lengthwise to make a thick rolled tube of lovely basil. I keep perhaps another 6-10 whole leaves for the very end.
I slice the basil just as thin as I can, slicing along the tube as if it were a jelly roll, then, I give a few slices through the pile of basil strips just to break them up a little.
I take half, and sprinkle it over the sparse layer of mozzarella.
Then I take two of the finest medium tomatoes I can find (not the biggest...the tastiest) I slice them very thin, and array them over the surface of the dough on top of the mozzarella. I put ground black pepper on the tomatoes here, but no salt. The Romano and Parmesan can be a bit salty, and adding salt here is too much, IMO.
I take half of the remaining chopped basil, and distribute it over the tomatoes.
I slice up the remaining ball of mozzarella into disks, and spread as many of them over the surface as I can to get this layer of cheese very thick.
I sprinkle the remaining chopped basil everywhere, then take the whole basil leaves and place them in an artistic way on the surface of it all.
Put it in the oven on the stone and bake for 11 minutes.
At 11 minutes, eyeball it closely, but don’t take it out unless it looks done. I have found that there is a wider range of crust consistency that is still “great” but crunchy crust-it is a disaster.
When it gets crunchy, you have ruined it, and it crosses that threshold quickly. At that point, you eat the pizza because you are probably hungry, not because it tastes brilliantly good.
If you do it right, you will see the flecks and strips of Romano and Parmesan that strayed onto the thicker outer crust, and they will be nicely darkened. And the crust will have that wonderful golden color with just a few places approaching brown.
Chewy inside. The outside has a hint of the olive oil/garlic/oregano flavor.
Chewy inside!
I move it onto a large cutting board, let it sit for 10 min (for my own self preservation, as I have no self control with blisteringly hot pizza) then I slice and serve.
I like mine with lots of crushed red pepper...:)
Corporate food, corporate customer service…yet drive-thru lines are up the wazoo 🙄 and people don’t seem to mind driving off with mistakes in their order, or un-fresh or cooled off food via doordash and other apps?
I buy the frozen Dijourno Supreme rising crust. Very good!!
Hunny makes kickass pies using locally-sourced frozen dough-balls (basil is our fave). We have no need to go out for pizza when she makes such a delightful premium pie right at home!
My absolute favorite chain pizza is Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza. IMO, coal or wood fired pizza tastes the best!
The cheese they use today is not mozzarella. Cost prohibitive.
Now it is dull and gray.
People do not go out for the food. They go out for the ambiance.
No games, no decor, no fun.
No reason to go.
Maybe if pizza places get away from 19 ingredient pizzas, and get back to basics, things would be better.
“Fast food pizza (Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Dominoes, Little Caesars, etc.) is crap”
You should’ve ended your sentence right there....
Pizza is one of the very few things that never disappoints here in NY despite all the other crap that goes on in this third world junkyard....that said- going into a pizza place and seeing pineapple and cesar salad and all this other crap on top of pizza that shouldn’t be there is nauseating...
I agree. I am a purist in many things, and I like my pizza very simple.
Immigration and diversity have ruined everything. Pizza is not immune from this disease.
Yeah, give me a NY slice, cheeze, done. All these other gimmicks add to the cost, and detract from the quality.
Matt Walsh just did a broadcast on why pizza sucks. According to him 75% of all pizza cheese is lab grown crap out of Denver. Large chains move as a herd and they have decided high profit (meaning cheap ingredient) mediocrity at $20 is more profitable than high quality at $30. Because they drive so much of the food production market small places have to pay even more for good ingredients and therefore a good pizza is often $40-50.
“The cheese they use today is not mozzarella.”
You’ve hit on it. Nearly all the cheapo pizza chains now use the same pseudo-cheese from a company called Leprino Foods.
Here’s the obituary of James Leprino, the man who did as much as anyone to wreck pizza.
“James Leprino, ‘Willy Wonka of Cheese’ Who Revolutionized Pizza, Dies at 87”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/business/james-leprino-dead.html
This is the money quote: “With more than 50 patents for cheese making, Leprino Foods reduced the aging process for mozzarella from 14 days to four hours”
Leprino’s cheap, quicky 4-hr “mozzarella” is crap... and is the reason why the $12.99 pizza from your local chain tastes like crap compared to the pizzas that you bought from them 40 years ago.
Anthony’s coal fired proclaims voted best pizza in US
(Newsweek) 16 inch pies $19.90- $27, haven’t seen anything close to $40-50 range around here.
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