The Case of the Political Pizza Hut

Love ’em or hate ’em, Pizza Huts are local landmarks.

Yes, they are part of a giant, multinational company. But there’s something about their iconic architecture that makes each stand-alone restaurant a unique addition to your street — a hut-like hipped roof, painted red, reaching upward like a church steeple.

Add a couple of decades’ worth of family dinners and suddenly a Pizza Hut is cemented into a neighbourhood’s collective memory.

That’s why it was an eye-catching change when an old Pizza Hut in Burnaby, at the northwest intersection of Hastings and Gamma, had its roof repainted.

Goodbye, red; hello, light blue.

The year was 2018, and Mike Hurley’s mayoral campaign was moving into the former restaurant, which had closed a year prior. Hurley would win the seat.

As Pizza Huts have been closing around the world, new tenants have moved in. Sometimes it’s another restaurant. Other times it’s something more unusual, like Enterprise Rent-a-Car.

But Burnaby’s old Pizza Hut is perhaps the only one with a political second life. It’s been home to campaigns every election since the restaurant’s closure.

I tracked down the building’s owner of 20 years to ask about this curiosity; his representative gave an interview but did not wish to be identified.

“We don’t have any affiliation to any political party,” he told me. “Whoever wants to rent it out, no problem. We just try and get whatever revenue we can to offset the costs. To develop something is quite an undertaking. We don’t have an appetite for that.”

Every time I’ve passed by over the years, I look to see who has moved in.

It’s a good spot for a campaign headquarters, right at the edge of the Burnaby Heights strip of businesses. Drivers passing by can’t miss it: it’s on a major corner, comes with a giant roof and has a billboard that can have any politician’s face slapped onto it.

Candidates running for all levels of government and from every political leaning have used the space.

But earlier this year, the property was put up for sale. This year’s provincial election could be its last.

A slice of politics and entertainment

Pizza is no longer served, but it’s been a lively few years for the property ever since the Pizza Hut restaurant moved out. Aside from politics, it’s also become a home to fictional restaurants for the big and small screen.

“They can transform it as they wish: paint it, put up any sort of fixtures, as long as they remove them and keep it in a good state when they leave,” said the owner’s rep.

In early 2018, the old Pizza Hut was turned into a Tex-Mex restaurant called Bueno Nacho for the live-action movie Kim Possible, based on the animated TV show.

While the building’s roof makes it ready for reinvention — Bueno Nacho CGI-ed a big sombrero in its place — the owner’s rep says that what film and TV crews are looking for most of all is easy access onto the set. The Pizza Hut’s spacious parking lot makes shooting convenient.

In 2019, Liberal MP Terry Beech moved in for the federal election, defending his seat against NDP challenger Svend Robinson. The Pizza Hut was repainted from light blue back to red. Beech’s team declined a request from me to visit.

In 2020, the BC Liberals didn’t bother repainting the Pizza Hut for the pandemic provincial election. Instead, it covered the property with signs for two of its candidates: Raymond Dong in Burnaby North and Tariq Malik in Burnaby-Lougheed.

In 2021, Terry Beech returned to the Pizza Hut for the federal election and won his seat for the third time.

In March 2024, it was turned into Coop’s Fried Chicken for the Apple TV show Firebug, about a troubled arson investigator, out next year. It had its most elaborate makeover yet, with new detailing on the roof and teal and orange paint for the sides.

“They actually made a drive-thru window, so they cut through the brick,” said the owner’s rep. “We’re not really attached to anything on the building itself, so we give them quite a bit of free rein.”

In May, the owner decided to put the property up for sale, advertising it as “a mixed-use development site with potential for condo and rental development.” Burnaby Heights, a classic example of a neighbourhood of houses and apartments along a high street, has been seeing more and more mid-rise development in recent years.

At first, I thought the sale posting would mark the end of the Pizza Hut’s career in politics and entertainment.

But then on Sept. 13, the owner’s rep handed the keys to the campaign of Michael Wu, who was originally running for the Burnaby North seat with BC United before joining the BC Conservatives.

Pizza Huts past and future

Brothers Dan and Frank Carney founded Pizza Hut in Wichita, Kansas, in 1958. The first location was in an unremarkable brick building that looked a bit like a house.

For Pizza Hut’s international expansion, they knew they needed something more. In 1969, the duo called up a fraternity brother named Richard D. Burke, who had become an architect, to help develop a new design.

The red-roofed restaurant hearkened back to the nostalgia of 1950s American fast food and the spaciousness of suburban car culture. It was instantly recognizable, but simple enough to be replicated in new locations.

“Wilder designs would have trouble getting these things approved,” the brothers once said, thinking of bureaucratic red tape.

The roof was so integral to the company’s brand identity that it was adopted as Pizza Hut’s logo, displacing a mascot named Pizza Pete.

As the company was purchased by one multinational after another and franchised, Pizza Huts spread across the globe. According to a count in 2004, there were 6,304 locations with the red roof.

In the 2010s, Pizza Hut struggled with mass closures and franchise bankruptcies, attempting to attract customers back with gimmicks such as cocktail bars and the return of the all-you-can-eat buffet.

Even as the restaurants closed, the huts proved they could survive without the pizza. Tenants took up residence in the old restaurants: churches, funeral homes, grocery stores, liquor stores, used car lots, other restaurants like American Chinese or Subways and, in a few rare cases, municipal operations.

Philip Langdon put it best in his book on the architecture of American fast food, titled Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: the roof is “something of a strange object — considered outside the realm of significant architecture, yet swiftly reflecting shifts in popular taste and unquestionably making an impact on daily life.”

Even with redecoration, you can always spot the old hut.

Pizza Hut architecture has garnered a passionate fan base over the years.

The popular design podcast 99% Invisible dedicated an episode to the huts back in 2014.

There is a book of beautiful photographs titled Pizza Hunt by Chloe Cahill and Ho Hai Tran of these adapted spaces.

The most influential is the website Used to Be a Pizza Hut, a crowdsourced global atlas of previous Pizza Huts, run by enthusiast Mike Neilson, who would love for you to submit an entry.

It’s proof that an old Pizza Hut can be home to anything, even a political campaign.

Homes without a hut

If a humble main street becomes hip and happening, attracting denser development, old one-storey buildings and stand-alone restaurants like the Pizza Hut won’t last long.

It’s all to do with taxes, says Morgan Dyer, the senior vice-president at Colliers who’s handling the sale of the Burnaby property with the old Pizza Hut.

“The land [value] goes up, the taxes go up, and most leases are triple net,” explained Dyer. That refers to the trio of property taxes, insurance and maintenance. “So it becomes very expensive for those poor old businesses that can’t handle it.”

At some point, the Pizza Hut was also home to the site office of a condo development across the street. A sign that it too would soon be redeveloped.

After Terry Beech refused to host me for a visit back in 2019, I thought I might have a better chance this provincial election to visit the hut before it comes down.

But Michael Wu of the BC Conservatives gave a similar response. “We’re fully focused on our campaign,” his email read. “Unfortunately, we’re unable to accommodate your request at this time.”

You can visit the heritage hut at the intersection of Hastings and Gamma before it — like everything inevitably is in Metro Vancouver — is turned into condos.

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