Taste Test: Is Pizza Hut's New Tavern-Style Pie as Good as Our Favorite Local Spot?

John Craig looks unimpressed. He, along with his wife Jandee, are the brains behind Da Sauce — Westword’s Best of Denver 2024 pick for Best Chicago-Style Eats. I’ve just brought a tavern-style pie from Pizza Hut into the Craigs' business and popped the top off the box. Frankly, I’m surprised they even let me in with it.

John immediately points out the two different types of pepperoni on the Pizza Hut pie (one traditional and one cupping) while Jandee prepares Da Sauce's housemade pepperoni pie for me.

For the better part of the next hour, I sample the two pies side by side. It doesn't take long to notice a difference — even the sight of the two pies couldn’t be more contrasting.

History
Chicago’s tavern-style pizza originated sometime back in the 1940s, when patrons would come into a bar, usually after work, needing some solid food with their beers. They wouldn't want the food to be too heavy — they still needed to eat dinner with their families when they got home. A thin, cracker crust pizza was born, cut into small squares, perfect for sampling. That’s the legend, anyway.

Today the style has become all the rage. Denver has over ten places slinging these square-cut, thin pies, and Da Sauce is among the best in the business. John grew up in Chicago Heights, just a town over from where I’m from. While the notable pizzas of the area influenced him — pies like the sweet-sauced one in the old Oven at Aurelio's in Homewood and the herbaceous pies from Sanfratello’s in Glenwood — Da Sauce has an original taste of its own.

Visual
Right from the start, it’s obvious these are two very different pies. The pizza hut one looks a bit lifeless; it’s very thin and stiff, with splotched, dry cheese on top. Da Sauce clearly has significantly more pop to it, with plenty of cheese and some shine from the oils.
Crust
One of my pet peeves in the pizza industry is having to order a pizza well done or crispy in order to have it cooked properly. There must be hordes of people who prefer floppy, doughy thin crust pizza out there, because more often than not, pizzerias are cooking them underdone. Not at Da Sauce — this is a well done, crispy pie.

Pizza Hut’s is also crispy, so credit goes where credit is due. That said, Da Sauce has a touch of chew inside of it and a fresh doughy flavor — the dough is made from scratch daily. Pizza Hut’s crust was very thin but also bland, like thin, crisp cardboard.

Sauce
This is where I thought Pizza Hut might do well, with a sauce formula that has likely been tested across the country for many years to the tune of millions of dollars. But there was hardly any sauce on the pie. It was like somebody took a very light paintbrush and just touched the pizza with it before adding some cheese on top.

Contrast that to Da Sauce — as the name implies, it really brings the sauce which boasts a mix of Italian herb flavors followed by a heavy dose of garlic backed by sweet tomatoes. This is a quality sauce that does the pizzeria’s name justice.
Pepperoni
As noted by John earlier, the pepperoni on the Pizza Hut pie contains both cupping pepperoni and flat pepperoni. It’s sitting on the top of the pie — a clear point of differentiation from Da Sauce’s version, on which the pepperoni is layered underneath the cheese with pieces sticking out along the crust. This gives the crust pieces a bit of crisp pepperoni, while the meat on the rest of the pie has a steamed-like quality, spreading the flavor from the oils throughout the pizza.

The Pizza Hut pepperoni are sharper, almost like a quick spicy bite, then you stop tasting them. The pepperoni that Da Sauce uses has a flavor that is both longer and smoother, with a real depth to it.

Cheese
The cheese is the best part of Pizza Hut's pie. It’s not spectacular — it does have a bit of a chewy plastic texture to it — but ultimately it smells and tastes like cheese.

Da Sauce uses a generous amount of cheese on its pizza for the style, but it’s an appropriate balance when you take into account the heftier crust and sauce. It’s a more substantial pie than the Pizza Hut version, but it’s also well balanced, with a creamy texture.

Price
Here you’d expect Pizza Hut to shine. And at first glance, it does: The fourteen-inch pepperoni that Pizza Hut touts as a large comes in at $12 before tax. Da Sauce charges $20.99 for a fourteen-inch (they call it a medium).

When one of the patrons sitting next to me at the bar asks what I'm was doing, he's happy to throw shade at Pizza Hut, but he does admit to eating it occasionally. He has a family of six to feed, he tells me, and he couldn't always afford to go with a premium pizza.

But over the course of eating these two pies, I come to the realization that the Pizza Hut pie isn't actually cheaper.

They're the same size, but comparing the width of the pizzas doesn’t tell the whole story. Evening ignoring the quality of ingredients, the pie from Da Sauce is significantly thicker. I measured a piece from each: Pizza Hut came in at about six millimeters thick, while Da Sauce measured a heftier eleven millimeters. It feels at least twice as heavy, too.

The man at the bar concedes that it takes a lot of pizza to fill up his family, while his friend mentions that he once had to eat two Pizza Hut pies at a movie theater in order to be full.

Thickness in pizza isn’t talked about too much in regard to price — typically, everybody compares the width of the pie — but as a native Chicagoan, I’ve learned with my own wallet the value (or lack of) in thickness. When you can barely finish a single slice of Chicago deep dish (the behemoth pizza that everybody associates with the city but is mostly eaten by tourists), it becomes fairly obvious that thickness plays an important role.
Verdict
You probably already knows the verdict here: support quality, locally owned places. John and Jandee work over 120 hours a week combined at Da Sauce. They clearly love what they do, and they aren't going to cut corners when what they've created is effectively an extension of themselves.

Going into this, I thought Pizza Hut was going to at least win on price — it’s almost half the cost of Da Sauce, which is in a more premium, downtown location. That’s not really the case, however, when you consider the size and weight of what you’re getting. And Da Sauce is using more expensive, tastier ingredients. So where is that money going?

Pizza Hut reportedly spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising each year and its parent company, Yum Brands, has a $37 billion market cap. A clearer picture begins to emerge: The power of advertising is strong, and many likely saw the catchy, focus-group-tested commercials during the Super Bowl last year. Corporate shareholders are pretty large mouths to feed as well. It's easy to see very little left for the actual pizza when you remove marketing costs and corporate profit margins.

A pizza maker friend of mine likes to say that there’s a time and a place for every type of pizza. I’ve accepted that at face value for a while, but this taste test is giving me second thoughts. The fast food-type places like Pizza Hut are not even open as late as Da Sauce (it serves until 2 a.m. on weekends!).

If you’re at home and out of delivery range from a quality spot, and you're too lazy to make a simple and tasty tortilla pizza, you'd be better off having a $5 frozen pizza on hand than ordering Pizza Hut's take on tavern-style.