Friday Pizza Nights Are Back!

I don’t even know how to make this funny because it’s embarrassing, so I’m just going to come right out and say it. We ate at Pizza Hut on Friday. We did. We moved our entire family to the entire other side of the world so we could eat at Pizza Hut on Friday night. And it was delicious, thankyouverymuch.

Back stateside, Friday night is pizza night in the Intrigue house. Sometimes we ordered in, sometimes we’d bake frozen pizza, and sometimes I’d make homemade pizza using Trader Joe’s dough, homemade sauce, cheese, and turkey pepperoni. I’m not big on eating pig, but I do love “roni” on my pizza.

Now that we’ve been in Sri Lanka for a while, we decided it was time to revive our Friday night tradition. Our residence hotel has room service, and they make some decent pizza, but we felt like going out, and Pizza Hut is within walking distance of our hotel, which is handy considering we have yet to find a car to purchase.

Are you just dying to know what a Pizza Hut in Sri Lanka is like? No? Well, too bad, because I can’t think of any other way to finish this blog post.

Pizza Hut in Sri Lanka is like…well, how do I say this?…Pizza Hut. I guess that’s kind of the beauty of chain restaurants. For the same reason we sometimes despise them, “They’re all pretty much the same,” “They have no personality,” they are also nice when you just want to know what to expect. We walked in and it was air conditioned. There was a big salad bar in the middle. The décor was a little more modern than I remembered, but I’ve been boycotting Pizza Hut since 2009, so I could have missed some corporate redecorating. (Yes, the Intrigue family likes a good boycott. We also boycott Heinz Ketchup and Amarillo, Texas, among a few other things.) Annoyingly, they didn’t have any high chairs, but that isn’t the most unusual thing in Colombo. All the employees were in their black pants and red polos. The managers meeting at a table in the back were wearing their blue chambray shirts and pizza topping ties. The female manager had on a white headscarf, but that was pretty much it for anything out of the ordinary. The menu stated that the restaurant started in "Kansas, United States, "also the birthplace of yours truly, coincidentally. Our girls were even given balloons. Amelia Earhart looked at hers and said, “It would probably pop if I stuck it with a toothpick.” We told her that’s exactly what would happen. The first time we turned our heads, she stuck it with a toothpick and it popped. She promptly dissolved into hysterical tears. Yes, just like dining out back in the States.

The menu was a little different. We had French fries for an appetizer—excuse me, “appetiser.” We could have stuffed crust pizza filled with cheese like in the States, or stuffed with chicken sausage. Not ground sausage, a big old log of chicken sausage. It didn’t look very appealing to me, but I had to talk the International Man of Intrigue out of it. We decided on two pizzas, one topped with Australian beef pepperoni and one tandoori chicken. Both were delicious. I loved that the pepperoni wasn’t pork, and the tandoori chicken was really flavorful and not too spicy. We branched out a little on drinks, too. I got a Fanta instead of my usual Coke Light and the International Man of Intrigue tried a cream soda, which turned out to be shockingly neon yellow colored and a bit gingery tasting.

Even though we spent the evening poking fun at ourselves for being the uncultured Americans who travel to the other side of the world and eat at Pizza Hut, it was kind of comforting. I made it up to myself by trying the cashew curry the next morning at breakfast.