Of course, Pizza Hut has been putting cheese into pizza crusts — where it manifestly does not belong — for decades now. What makes their new endeavor different is that they’re now jamming either pepperoni or what I’m pretty sure the TV ads refer to as “meaty” (full stop), which is a short way of describing a pizza crust crammed with shards of sausage, bacon and “beef.” Pigs and cows, in other words, but only the parts of which are choice enough to be cheese-jected into pizza crust.

– David Roth.

Roth, whom I was prepared to call one of my favorite writers on the Internet even before he complimented my sandwich reviews, just tears Pizza Hut apart here — and not in the way Pizza Hut wants to be torn apart (at the perforated crust). I’ve been saying this since the stuffed-crust pizza came out: How about instead of coming up with new pizza gimmicks, you put some of that research and development into making better pizza?

Fun fact: Sophomore year of college my roommate Will won a year’s supply of Pizza Hut by winning some dumb contest at Midnight Madness. “A year’s supply” amounted to something like 30 coupons for free pizzas, of which we used, I am pretty certain, one. We ate one Pizza Hut pizza and realized we never wanted any more ever. We thought about ordering all our remaining pizzas in one shot for some sort of craft project, but we never got around to it, what with all the video games there were to play.

Fun fact, pt. 2: I ate Pizza Hut once again, about five years after the sophomore-year order. After a couple of weeks in China, I confessed to a friend and fellow traveler that, though I appreciated the Chinese food we had enjoyed and didn’t want to seem uncouth, I was desperate to eat something I could identify. Turned out she felt the same way, so we hit the Hut. There are Pizza Huts everywhere in China, and they’re reasonably fancy restaurants, like as if they won the fast-food wars. Problem is, they still serve godawful Pizza Hut pizza. About three bites deep I was ready to go back to delicious Chinese unidentifiable-meat-in-goo.