Takeaway Truth: Pizza Hut New Yorker

Takeaway Truth is an occasional Lifehacker feature where we compare marketing images against what you actually get served. Today — Pizza Hut’s New Yorker Pizza.

Fast food restaurants have been known to fib when it comes to accurate depictions of their menu items. Far too often, the mouth-watering feast on the poster turns out to be a limp and oily morsel. In a bid to keep the fry-jockey overlords honest, we’ve decided to document the reality of fast food — it was either that, or go postal like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

At the beginning of the month, Pizza Hut capped the price of pickup pizzas at just $8.50, every day of the week. To commemorate the occasion, it also launched a range of new menu offerings, including the subject of this week’s Takeaway Truth>: the New Yorker.

Unlike Pizza Hut’s Big New Yorker in the US, the Australian version doesn’t come with a specialty crust or extra-wide footprint. Instead, it’s just a standard, run-of-the-mill pizza topped with pepperoni, mushroom, italian sausage and oregano. All of these ingredients are part of Pizza Hut’s standard menu, so the novelty value is basically nil. It would have been nice to see American-style pepperoni or a deep pan pizza base, but it unfortunately wasn’t to be. Ho-hum.

As part of Pizza Hut’s premium “Favourites” range, the New Yorker has a pickup price of $8.50. It packs in 6786kJ of energy, or 848kJ per slice. This makes it one of the fattier options on the Favourites menu, bested only by the Super Supreme (6816kJ), BBQ Meat Lovers (7542kJ) and the BBQ Cheeseburger (6973kJ).

So how does the Pizza Hut New Yorker stack up to the marketing? The below image is how the New Yorker appears on Pizza Hut’s online ordering menu:

And here’s what we actually got served from an outlet in Emu Plains, NSW:

Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

Curiously, Pizza Hut didn’t cut its pizza into slices for the marketing image, presumably in a bid to make it look neater. We wouldn’t call this false advertising however, as nobody on Earth would expect to receive a non-sliced pizza. (We’ll put this down to permissible artistic license.)

Otherwise, we think the resemblance is pretty good — the toppings are similarly sized, roughly equal in number and can be readily identified on the base. Our only gripe is the crust which is a bit squashed and burnt looking. For the second week in a row, our Takeaway Truth defendant has managed to pull off a “not guilty” verdict. Could Australia’s fast food companies finally be lifting their game?

Truth rating: 7/10

Which fast food franchise or menu item would you like us to tackle next? Let us know in the comments section below.


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