The wait is over. Sunday night during the Super Bowl, Pizza Hut revealed its latest, earth-shattering innovation:
Pizza sliders.
Last week Gut Check stalked spoke with Pizza Hut spokesman Doug Terfehr, hoping to get the scoop on the chain's new pizza permutation. Having managed only to tease a few hints out of the dude, we felt it our duty to seize our first opportunity to hunt down the new pizza sliders give 'em a swallow.
See also: - Pizza Hut Gives Gut Check 3 Clues About "Pizza Innovation" to Be Unveiled During Super Bowl
Our first two impressions: 1. As you can see from the photo above, they look...different. 2. We don't get it.
What has us puzzled is how Pizza Hut came to call this product a "slider." Seems like they're playing pretty fast and loose with the terminology. A White Castle burger is a slider: a wee sandwich you can devour in a single bite. These are...well, they're mini pizzas.
They're cute, in the way all miniature things are cute -- babies, kittens, those bottles of liquor you get on airplanes -- but mini pizzas have been done. Totino's Pizza Rolls, pizza Bagel Bites and Smart Ones Pizza Minis (to name a few) all came before, so what's so innovative about the Pizza Hut sliders?
One innovation we surely could have done without was the hour-and-40-minute wait. We were also kinda weirded out by the crust, which tastes somehow as though it has been deep-fried. (Think funnel cakes.)
Pizza Hut touts the fact its sliders are fully customizable. Which is true. If you order the three-slider size, you can choose what toppings you want on each of your wee pizzas. But having opted for a large order (nine), we were allowed the same total of topping choices, i.e., three. (We went with veggie, Hawaiian and pepperoni.) For the price -- $10.85 -- we could have bitten the bullet, made up our damn mind what toppings we wanted and ordered a medium pizza.
All that said, Pizza Hut is giving away samples of the sliders at all locations this afternoon from 4 to 7 p.m. Yep, waltz on in and order a slider, eat it, and when you discover you're still hungry, order a real pizza like a grownup.
Nice try, Pizza Hut, but you're going to have to go a lot farther to top your stuffed-crust pizza, which you debuted back in the mid '90s.
Now, that was an innovation.
