A Pizza Hut Adventure

On Friday, March 27, I went out for a little Pizza Hut adventure. At this point I had been in Turkey for almost two months. Surprisingly, after two months away, you begin to miss certain aspects of the United States. One of those is the variety of food we have. The food here in Turkey, with the exception of specialty restaurants has a lot of similarities. Its usually meaty and seasoned with similar spices. It’s actually quite delicious, but after too long you begin to miss things in life like Chinese food or sushi or in this case, pizza.

I actually didn’t realize I had missed American food at all until the day before. I was sitting in my EU Relations with Russia and CIS countries next to Merve, a Turkish girl who I had spoken with a couple of times but only rarely. Professor Serra, our visiting professor from Spain, decided to show us a clip of a far right Russian political commentator about the rising power of Russia and how dangerous it is. It was recorded during the Georgia Conflict in August 2008. Before the clip started, an advertisement (from the previous commercial break) ran about Pizza Hut. After I saw that I was done. I exclaimed, “oh I miss pizza.” Ironically, I did so at the same time as Emine, Merve’s friend who was sitting on the other side of her. Merve laughed and then decided that they were going to go get pizza hut and decided to invite me to come along.

I am so glad that I did. We rode the bus to Pizza Hut which is located in Beşkitaş in what I liked to call “Little America.” Before I knew my way around Istanbul, I always knew I was near Örtaköy and Taksım Meydanı (Taksim Square) because of this small little section. It is a collection of four stores in a row on the main street featuring a Pizza Hut, Burger King, KFC, and Starbucks. Definitely the place to go if you’re craving Americanism! We go inside the Pizza Hut and sit down. My first observation was that it is amazing how much nicer American fast food chains are in foreign countries! McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Burger King, etc are seen as more elite dining places (similar to our equivalent of Chili’s or Bennigan’s or something like that in the US). Actually, on a side note, there is a Chili’s in Etiler and it’s one of the most expensive restaurants on the strip. It’s very funny for me to see a Chili’s with a very classy look and valet parking. Once we sit down, we all order a coke, which costs 3 Lira (about $1.75) and no refills. Pizza Hut can afford to sell coke more expensively because it is a “nicer restaurant.” It was funny to me that Pizza Hut was even serving Coca Cola, as it is a subsidiary of Pepsi. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I have actually seen a presence from Pepsi at all in Turkey other than their food. We could have gotten the all you can eat pizza buffet for 10 Lira (about $6.00) but decided that since we go to Pizza Hut on such a rare occasion, we should go all out. We ordered two large pizzas to share (the large pizzas are much smaller here) with stuffed crust pizza! Yum. I was a bit disappointed in both the size of the pizzas (and their price for what you got) and also the dearth of cheese that was put inside the stuffed crust. I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. We had a pepperoni, mushroom, and cheese pizza and some other kind of pizza, which I don’t remember (I might be able to remember if I looked at the menu). The pizza combinations were slightly different here and tasted a little different. It was still pizza hut but…different. It certainly doesn’t measure up to Moon River Pizza in Fernandina Beach and value is not nearly as good as Rocco’s in Atlanta, but you take what you can get. I was happy with what I got.

The best part of the evening was the company though. It was really nice eating out with Emine and Merve. We talked about a few things to get to know each other and then talked a bit about Turkish and American politics (it’s only natural since we are all Political Science majors!) I don’t remember exactly what we talked about (I really should try to update these blogs sooner than three weeks after an event happens). Hopefully it will be easier now that finals were over. After dinner, we took the bus back to Hisarüstü where we had çay in the new Hisar café that just opened. The new café is open 24 hours and is insanely cheap (küçük çay only 75 kuruş). As many of you know, I am definitely not a fan of tea or hot drinks (the only hot drinks I would drink until recently were hot apple cider and hot chocolate). Drinking çay is essential to Turkish culture and I have started to acquire a taste for it. I actually really like how Turks invite each other out to tea all of the time. I wish we would do it more often in the US (except for Stanton…he drinks too much hot tea as it is). We talked some more over tea and then I went home.