Bad for your health

Brothers Dan and Frank Carney opened a restaurant in Kansas in 1958. They could afford only nine letters on the sign, of which six were "pizza". Dan liked "fun" but Frank preferred "hut". A more suitable choice might have been "die".

For not only is it a preferable option to visiting Pizza Hut (and knowing how popular the Hut is, I accept I may be in a minority), but if you regularly eat there you may run the risk of meeting your maker earlier than you planned. It is profoundly unhealthy.

Prejudice without experience is meaningless. So my colleague Andrew joined me to ensure a balanced assessment. He is a state-school Leftie and I am the opposite.

The interior was filthy. The banquette was stained and the table sticky. The diners were a mixture of tourists and Londoners. We ordered two starters: dippin' chicken (£3.29) and cheesy wrap (2.99). They arrived. We tossed for it. I won, so I made Andrew eat the chicken.

"You can only taste fat," he said grimly. I tried one. The bread coating was limp and the chicken spongy and grey. There was a sweet dip and a cursory bit of lettuce that looked exhausted and lonely. The greasy, cheesy wrap was pitta with tomato and cheese. It was marginally more enjoyable, but that's like saying North Korea is a marginally better holiday destination than Chernobyl.

There are four pizza bases: deep pan is thick and fluffy, Italian is thin and classic, stuffed crust has cheese piped into the crust and there's also crust-free.

Toppings range from Farmhouse (ham and mushroom) to Hawaiian (ham and pineapple), priced from £4.99 to £10.99 depending on the size of your pizza.

There are speciality pizzas such as Meat Feast (spicy pork, ham, pepperoni, spicy beef) and the absurd-sounding Super Supreme (spicy pork, pepperoni, spicy beef, mushrooms, black olives, ham, red onion and green pepper), £5.99 to £12.99. I ordered one. Andrew, a braver man, had a large stuffed-crust, half-Hawaiian and half jalapeno peppers.

I visited a miserable-looking salad bar (plate £4.99, one visit only) that had signs trumpeting government guidelines about five daily fruit or vegetable portions. I eyed the gunky pasta swirls in sticky goo, the potato salad swimming in mayonnaise and the "bacon bits". Andrew liked the bacon bits despite my reminder that they are the only known food item to enter and leave the body in the same state.

Stella Artois is served in bottles, which was handy as a lipstick-wearing snail appeared to have danced in my glass. The pizzas arrived and we did our best. The Super Supreme was a culinary car crash; the base a slippery pillow of fat and the eight toppings singularly horrid - tinned, processed or cheap - and collectively inedible.