Pizza Hunt Exhibition and Pizza Party

Overview

Pizza Hut. The noble and long-serving 'za provider who filled our tummies at last-day-of-school pizza lunch and, in our uni student years, staved off hunger and calcium deficiency with cheap Tuesday deals. That is until in 1983 when the Dominos chain hit our shores. Dominos grew in reach and popularity and brought the Hut to its knees (or at least, to mainly smaller takeaway-only venues, less all-you-can-eat restaurants). Sure, there's still a few floating around (lookin' at you Goulburn), but they're harder and harder to come by nowadays.

Once a dignified, family-friendly palace of soft serve on-tap, mini marshmallows and slice after slice after slice, Pizza Hut is now reduced to stunt-like takeaway grotesquery such as the Four 'N Twenty Meat Pie crust and its ilk, cramming more and more fast food, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, cheeseburgers into the crust until it's just a misshapen farce oozing with disappointment. There's not much scope for an in-house sit-down pig-out any more.

Apparently someone else also noticed the decline. Sydney-based photographer Ho Hai Tran took up the quest of documenting the last surviving original Pizza Hut buildings before they pass into irrelevance. Alongside co-pizza tracker Chloe Cahill, Tran has travelled 14,000kms across Australia, New Zealand and the USA to try and capture the photos of the buildings, most of which have been converted for other uses.

Now, after two years, the Pizza Hunt has come back to Sydney, culminates in an exhibition at Sun Studios in Alexandria. There'll be a big flashy opening, an artist talk, and of course, a pizza party on Thursday, August 4 from 6-8pm (you just have to RSVP to rsvp@sunstudiosaustralia.com). The exhibition runs until August 18.