Below, a timely option we put together to deal with Thanksgiving leftovers, and some other unusual toppings we tried on tips from community members.
Some of them will raise eyebrows, but all are surprisingly delicious. And none involve pineapple, in case you were wondering.
Thanksgiving Leftovers Pizza
Chowhound
Gravy takes the place of pizza sauce and the crust is scattered with shredded turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and cheese. There are really no rules, though; think of the pizza dough as your blank canvas and paint it with whatever leftovers you like best.
“Building from the bottom up…salsa, cheese, taco seasoned burger [meat] browned nicely, then after removing from the oven…slather [with] a bunch of sour cream and [pile] shredded lettuce on it.” —gtogirl
Sardine Pizza
“Sardines, red onions, black olives.” —NovoCuisine
“Potato, bacon, garlic, and sour cream, but I live in Japan where they have wild and wonderful toppings. Squid and black olive with shiso isn’t bad at all.” —repartee
Nutty Pizza
“Sausage, pepperoni, onions, and cashews.” —Jabber95125
Butternut Squash Pizza
“Garlic [and] olive oil topped with gruyère, caramelized onions, baked butternut squash slices; five minutes before done, add fried (in butter) sage strips and parmesan breadcrumbs and return to oven to brown.” —Emme
HARRIS COUNTY, Texas (KTRK) -- District 5 Harris County deputies responded to an assault call late Friday night, discovering a large amount of drugs at a hotel.
Captain J. Shannon said on Twitter that a pizza delivery driver was assaulted at the hotel.
Shannon said upon arrival they found four males with weapons, cash, illegal THC oil and nearly two pounds of marijuana.
In photos attached to his tweet, deputies posed with the illegal substances found.
Shannon did not specify the exact location of the hotel in his tweet.
It took Charles Green more than a year to get back to business after he lost everything in a fire in 2018.
He was excited to reopen the Chicago-style pizzeria Windy City Pizza just before Thanksgiving on Nov. 24 in its new location 5824 FM 1960 E., Atascocita. Though the process was arduous, Green is happy to be back in business in Atascocita. The fire happened in July 2018 in his previous building at 5377 Atascocita Road, Humble, just around the corner from his new location. Green lost everything in the fire and had to start from the ground up.
“It’s a lot of work, a lot of struggle, lot of stress, lot of prayers,” Green said two days before he opened. “Trying to locate equipment is very hard, trying to get stuff shipped in.”
Green is currently a one-man band, starting his day early in the morning to prepare his food daily to maintain quality and freshness.
He makes everything homemade from scratch and ships in the ingredients from Chicago locations. He calls it old school Chicago and Italian — his business includes a brick stone oven and original ingredients. He serves more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings. He also makes angus beef hamburgers for lunches and special days. Orders are mostly for to-go or delivery as there is limited seating in the building.
“When you’re making everything from scratch and when you’re buying quality, it makes you stand out,” Green said. “It makes you have a superior product that’s not better or worse, it’s just different. And it’s made with a lot of love and a lot of care.”
Green takes pride in the freshness of his products, cooking everything to order.
“My products are only made to order, so all food in the building has to be ordered and then it’s actually cooked, not heated up,” Green said.
It has taken a lot of work for Green to reopen his traditional pizzeria. He said before he opened he had customers calling and stopping by his new location pulling at the doors to see if he was open yet.
“If you know about Illinois style pizza or even perhaps authentic New York style - not just the places that say they do it - if you’re familiar with those up north type styles of real Italian food, then you’ll actually appreciate what I’ve done here for almost 10 years now,” Green said.
Windy City Pizza is open Monday - Saturday 11 a.m. - 9 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m. For more information about Windy City Pizza, visit their website at http://www.windycitypizza.net .
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza reopens in Atascocita after devastating fire
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It took Charles Green more than a year to get back to business after he lost everything in a fire in 2018.
He was excited to reopen the Chicago-style pizzeria Windy City Pizza just before Thanksgiving on Nov. 24 in its new location 5824 FM 1960 E., Atascocita. Though the process was arduous, Green is happy to be back in business in Atascocita. The fire happened in July 2018 in his previous building at 5377 Atascocita Road, Humble, just around the corner from his new location. Green lost everything in the fire and had to start from the ground up.
“It’s a lot of work, a lot of struggle, lot of stress, lot of prayers,” Green said two days before he opened. “Trying to locate equipment is very hard, trying to get stuff shipped in.”
Green is currently a one-man band, starting his day early in the morning to prepare his food daily to maintain quality and freshness.
He makes everything homemade from scratch and ships in the ingredients from Chicago locations. He calls it old school Chicago and Italian — his business includes a brick stone oven and original ingredients. He serves more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings. He also makes angus beef hamburgers for lunches and special days. Orders are mostly for to-go or delivery as there is limited seating in the building.
“When you’re making everything from scratch and when you’re buying quality, it makes you stand out,” Green said. “It makes you have a superior product that’s not better or worse, it’s just different. And it’s made with a lot of love and a lot of care.”
Green takes pride in the freshness of his products, cooking everything to order.
“My products are only made to order, so all food in the building has to be ordered and then it’s actually cooked, not heated up,” Green said.
It has taken a lot of work for Green to reopen his traditional pizzeria. He said before he opened he had customers calling and stopping by his new location pulling at the doors to see if he was open yet.
“If you know about Illinois style pizza or even perhaps authentic New York style - not just the places that say they do it - if you’re familiar with those up north type styles of real Italian food, then you’ll actually appreciate what I’ve done here for almost 10 years now,” Green said.
Windy City Pizza is open Monday - Saturday 11 a.m. - 9 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m. For more information about Windy City Pizza, visit their website at http://www.windycitypizza.net .
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza opened in its new location on Nov. 24. The Chicago-stylepizzeria offers more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings.
Windy City Pizza reopens in Atascocita after devastating fire
Back to Gallery
It took Charles Green more than a year to get back to business after he lost everything in a fire in 2018.
He was excited to reopen the Chicago-style pizzeria Windy City Pizza just before Thanksgiving on Nov. 24 in its new location 5824 FM 1960 E., Atascocita. Though the process was arduous, Green is happy to be back in business in Atascocita. The fire happened in July 2018 in his previous building at 5377 Atascocita Road, Humble, just around the corner from his new location. Green lost everything in the fire and had to start from the ground up.
“It’s a lot of work, a lot of struggle, lot of stress, lot of prayers,” Green said two days before he opened. “Trying to locate equipment is very hard, trying to get stuff shipped in.”
Green is currently a one-man band, starting his day early in the morning to prepare his food daily to maintain quality and freshness.
He makes everything homemade from scratch and ships in the ingredients from Chicago locations. He calls it old school Chicago and Italian — his business includes a brick stone oven and original ingredients. He serves more than just pizza, including Italian sandwiches, calzones, gyros, pasta and oven-cooked wings. He also makes angus beef hamburgers for lunches and special days. Orders are mostly for to-go or delivery as there is limited seating in the building.
“When you’re making everything from scratch and when you’re buying quality, it makes you stand out,” Green said. “It makes you have a superior product that’s not better or worse, it’s just different. And it’s made with a lot of love and a lot of care.”
Green takes pride in the freshness of his products, cooking everything to order.
“My products are only made to order, so all food in the building has to be ordered and then it’s actually cooked, not heated up,” Green said.
It has taken a lot of work for Green to reopen his traditional pizzeria. He said before he opened he had customers calling and stopping by his new location pulling at the doors to see if he was open yet.
“If you know about Illinois style pizza or even perhaps authentic New York style - not just the places that say they do it - if you’re familiar with those up north type styles of real Italian food, then you’ll actually appreciate what I’ve done here for almost 10 years now,” Green said.
Windy City Pizza is open Monday - Saturday 11 a.m. - 9 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m. For more information about Windy City Pizza, visit their website at http://www.windycitypizza.net .
Serving up unique varieties of pizza and original craft beers and cocktails, Rhombus Guys is slice above the rest.
"I think we've always tried to bring something new and innovative and fantastic to the customer," says co-owner Arron Hendricks. "We define customer service as providing the customer with service and products that exceed their expectations."
With over 30 pizza options, along with sandwiches and appetizers — like cheesy garlic bread —in a family-friendly environment, there is something for every appetite, big and small.
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Looking to try something new? Rhombus has a pizza of the month to bring their customers out of their comfort zones. Wanting a fan favorite? Try the T-Rex pizza. It's loaded with marinara, pepperoni, sausage, Canadian bacon, beef, bacon and mozzarella that will bring out the carnivore in anyone.
BANGOR, Maine (WABI) - A local wood-fired pizza truck on the Bangor waterfront now has a new place to call home...
Pompeii Pizza now has a storefront that is open and located at 98 Central in downtown Bangor.
This means they are now open year-round, seven days a week.
The food truck will also stay open on the Bangor waterfront May through October.
They will soon have more menu items as well.
Folks can dine in or take out and delivery will also be an option.
"We are very thankful for the people that we had in our corner that have tirelessly worked day in and day out, morning, night, whenever they could get in here and to be open now. Downtown is thriving right now and continues to grow and so we were just very lucky to get one of the last spots."
Pompeii Pizza is open Monday through Friday 11-8, Saturday 11-10 and Sunday 11-2.
If you are wondering where you can find the best pizza in Eau Claire, or just want a slice while watching the game, then check out the Eau Claire Children’s Museum Pizza Fest Celebration!
At the celebration, vote on pizza from over ten vendors. Pizza will be brought in from national chains like Dominos, Toppers, and Little Ceasers, as well as local pits like Jim Bob’s and Wiscos. You can vote on categories like “Most Unique,” “Kid Favorite,” “Fan Favorite,” “Best Crust,” and “Most Cheesy.”
The entire second floor will be closed off for the event, but event attendees can play wherever they’d like. They will also be playing the Packer Game, so you can kick back and relax.
Pizza Fest on December 8th from noon till 2 P.M. The cost is $10 a person or $40 for the whole family, no matter how many members you have. But if you have more than 4 people in your family, then be sure to email mandy@childrensmuseumec.com to make sure you get your discount. For more information and to register, head to their website.
Northwestern Bank is the gracious sponsor of the event.
Two new restaurants headed to Deerbrook, new Pizza joint opens in Huffman
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Deerbrook Mall is introducing two new eateries — Dolce and Cannoli Pizzeria and Burger Buzz — before the end of the year.
Dolce and Cannoli Pizzeria is a Houston-based restaurant that recently opened as a startup. The menu offers New-York style pizza, cannolis, sandwiches and soups, according to Carlos Limontes, senior general manager of Deerbrook Mall. They will be located on the lower level in the center court next to the G by Guess and are scheduled to open in mid-December.
“Located outside the food court area, Dolce and Cannoli Pizzeria will offer guests a wonderful place to stop and enjoy a chef-inspired meal,” Limontes said by email. “It will have a patio area with seating as well as a bar that serves beer and wine.”
Burger Buzz, a Houston based restaurant, is opening its first location in the area in December. They specialize in gourmet burgers but also serve shakes and wings, Limontes said. They will be located in the food court next to Sarku Japan.
“With the addition of these two restaurants, it shows our continued focus on enhancing our offerings,” Limontes said. “Adding Burger Buzz to our food court will give our guests more options for dining. We anticipate a strong performance from Burger Buzz as the only restaurant in the food court that will serve burgers.”
Mario’s Pizzaria Opens in Huffman
Mario’s Pizzaria opened in Huffman the week before Thanksgiving with a successful turnout of customers. Mario’s Pizza is located at 24501 FM 2100 Ste. D, Huffman.
Mayer Assolin, the owner of Mayer’s Landscaping and Mario’s Pizzeria, bought out the business, which was formerly known as Big B’s Pizzeria because hir daughter worked there for six years. He moved the business to a new location in March and opened on Nov. 21. Their food has changed from what it was before, improving the ingredients and quality of the pizza. Most of their food is delivered, but they offer carry out and small chairs to dine in as well.
If you need a break from all the talk of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and pie after Thanksgiving, the chefs over at the Bon Appétit's Test Kitchen are here to give you a much-needed break as they compete to see who can make a pizza the fastest.
Starring 10 chefs, the Pizza Making Speed Challenge is a fun little diversion for most of these people. Several of the cooks mention that they don't like doing things quickly, and Priya Krishna notes that she's never made a pizza before. Her lack of experience really shows when some errant mozzarella catches fire in her oven and Brad Leone puts it out for her with a bunch of salt.
Despite all of them being professional chefs, there's a surprising 4-minute spread on pizza completion times, which goes to show that you're not alone when you mess up in the kitchen, even on the easiest of foods.
Deerbrook Mall is introducing two new eateries — Dolce and Cannoli Pizzeria and Burger Buzz — before the end of the year.
Dolce and Cannoli Pizzeria is a Houston-based restaurant that recently opened as a startup. The menu offers New-York style pizza, cannolis, sandwiches and soups, according to Carlos Limontes, senior general manager of Deerbrook Mall. They will be located on the lower level in the center court next to the G by Guess and are scheduled to open in mid-December.
“Located outside the food court area, Dolce and Cannoli Pizzeria will offer guests a wonderful place to stop and enjoy a chef-inspired meal,” Limontes said by email. “It will have a patio area with seating as well as a bar that serves beer and wine.”
Burger Buzz, a Houston based restaurant, is opening its first location in the area in December. They specialize in gourmet burgers but also serve shakes and wings, Limontes said. They will be located in the food court next to Sarku Japan.
“With the addition of these two restaurants, it shows our continued focus on enhancing our offerings,” Limontes said. “Adding Burger Buzz to our food court will give our guests more options for dining. We anticipate a strong performance from Burger Buzz as the only restaurant in the food court that will serve burgers.”
Mario’s Pizzaria Opens in Huffman
Mario’s Pizzaria opened in Huffman the week before Thanksgiving with a successful turnout of customers. Mario’s Pizza is located at 24501 FM 2100 Ste. D, Huffman.
Mayer Assolin, the owner of Mayer’s Landscaping and Mario’s Pizzeria, bought out the business, which was formerly known as Big B’s Pizzeria because hir daughter worked there for six years. He moved the business to a new location in March and opened on Nov. 21. Their food has changed from what it was before, improving the ingredients and quality of the pizza. Most of their food is delivered, but they offer carry out and small chairs to dine in as well.
If you are wondering where you can find the best pizza in Eau Claire, or just want a slice while watching the game, then check out the Eau Claire Children’s Museum Pizza Fest Celebration!
At the celebration, vote on pizza from over ten vendors. Pizza will be brought in from national chains like Dominos, Toppers, and Little Ceasers, as well as local pits like Jim Bob’s and Wiscos. You can vote on categories like “Most Unique,” “Kid Favorite,” “Fan Favorite,” “Best Crust,” and “Most Cheesy.”
The entire second floor will be closed off for the event, but event attendees can play wherever they’d like. They will also be playing the Packer Game, so you can kick back and relax.
Pizza Fest on December 8th from noon till 2 P.M. The cost is $10 a person or $40 for the whole family, no matter how many members you have. But if you have more than 4 people in your family, then be sure to email mandy@childrensmuseumec.com to make sure you get your discount. For more information and to register, head to their website.
Northwestern Bank is the gracious sponsor of the event.
I love Thanksgiving as much as the next, but more than that, I love Thanksgiving leftovers. And while you'd think I'd get my fill on the actual holidays (seconds are the bare minimum here, people), I don't. I'm piling my plate with turkey and mashed potatoes until my fridge is fresh out.
But here's the thing: if you're chowing down on stuffing and pumpkin pie for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you're gonna wind up depleting your supply before Monday. So why not switch it up for Black Friday? Much like TV's, bluetooth speakers, and that Instant Pot you've been itching for -- pizza is on sale. Plus, you'll need to carbo-load if you're planning to brawl a bunch of suburban moms for that last pair of AirPods in stock.
Mountain Mike's Pizza The deal: Snag $5 off with code "820028" when you order two medium pizzas. When: November 29 - December 13
Fresh Brothers The deal: Get a free medium Cheese Original Crust Pizza and extra $5 when you buy a $50 gift card. When: November 29
Papa Gino's
The deal: You can get 20% off online orders with promo code "7650." When: November 29-December 1
Slice
The deal: get $5 off your first order (there is a $5.50 minimum, FYI) when you use code "PARTYPIZZA." When: Through December 1, 2019
Blaze Pizza
The deal: You can score $5 off your next pizza when purchasing a $25 gift card online or in stores, but only for a short time. When: Ongoing
Pizza Hut
The deal: Large three-topping pizzas are available for just $7.99 each, when you order for pick-up. When: Ongoing
Little Caesars The deal: Get free Crazy Bread when you order any pizza online using code CRAZY3B. When: Ongoing
Hungry Howie's The deal: Grab $1 medium one-topping pizzas when you buy a regularly priced large. Use code "LHP10." When: Ongoing
Domino's The deal: You can't go wrong with the chain's classic "Mix & Match" offer. Order two or more pizzas, pasta, bread bites, or boneless wings for $5.99 each. When: Ongoing
7-Eleven The deal: Hit up your local 7-Eleven and you can leave with two slices of pizza for $2. When: Through December 31
Cici's
The deal: Get a three-course combo deal (with Cheesy Bread, a large one-topping pizza, and a small Cinnamon Rolls) for $9.99. When: Through January 5, 2020
It’s dangerous for leaders to outlive their countries. Whether they move on or become obsessed with returning to power, they cannot escape their role as symbols of a vanished world—a condition fraught with both nostalgia and danger.
Nobody knows that burden like Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union. Since his involuntary retirement, Gorbachev has raised money for worthy causes, attempted to make a comeback in Russian politics, and, notoriously, made an advertisement for Pizza Hut.
The ad would have become a footnote were it not for its long second life online, where it’s rediscovered every few years. There’s an undeniable voyeuristic frisson of seeing a man who once commanded a superpower hawking pizza.
Each time it repeats, it leaves behind a new flood of clickbait—Timelisting it among the “Top 10 Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials” in 2010, Mental Flossusing Gorbachev’s birthday as a hook to link to it in 2012, Thrillistnaming it the sixth-most bizarre celebrity endorsement of all time. Most of the facts dredged up in these deluges are recycled from a 1997 New York Times article.
More serious authors treat the commercial as a free-floating signifier to prove whatever thesis they are peddling, as when Jacobin cites it as another data point showing that Gorbachev was a sellout or David Foster Wallace uses it to prove the vacuity of popular culture.
But the conventional stories don’t really hold up. Gorbachev isn’t actually the star of the commercial. He doesn’t even speak. He’s a bystander to the commercial’s central drama, a fight over Gorbachev’s legacy between a fiery, pro-reform young man and a dour, anti-Gorbachev middle-aged man—possibly father and son. The two exchange charges and defenses of Gorbachev’s record—“Because of him, we have economic confusion!” “Because of him, we have opportunity!” “Complete chaos!” “Hope!”—before an older woman settles the argument: “Because of him, we have many things … like Pizza Hut!”
In a lot of ways, it’s a beautiful short film and a very weird advertisement: Who would have thought that a bunch of Muscovites bickering about the end of communism would be a natural pitch for pizza?
For the people who created the ad—the executives, the agents, the creatives—it was a professional landmark. But for Gorbachev himself, the story of the ad is a tragedy: one man’s attempt to find—and to fund—a place in a country that wanted nothing more to do with him.
For the world, the death of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical earthquake. For Gorbachev, it was a forced retirement at the hands of his rival—and successor as Russian leader—Boris Yeltsin. According to the biographer William Taubman in Gorbachev: His Life and Times, Gorbachev reciprocated Yeltsin’s hatred, telling one journalist: “When they hang me, make sure that they don’t hang Yeltsin from the same birch tree.”
Initially, Yeltsin and Gorbachev avoided direct conflict. But within months of the Russian Federation’s establishment, Gorbachev began criticizing Yeltsin publicly. In retaliation, the Russian president ordered an audit into whether Gorbachev’s foundation was illegally using Communist Party funds. Then the Kremlin systematically removed the foundation’s sources of support, ginned up protests to harass the foundation, and finally cut its office space to a few thousand square feet.
Yeltsin’s final victory would come in the 1996 election. That year, Gorbachev challenged Yeltsin by launching his own bid for the presidency—scraping just 0.5 percent of the first-round vote. After that victory, Yeltsin left the foundation alone. Yet the years of presidential harassment had taken its toll on Gorbachev’s finances. In 1991, the heads of the former Soviet republics had voted to give Gorbachev a pension of 4,000 rubles per month—but it was not indexed to inflation. By 1994, according to Meduza, his pension was worth less than $2 a month.
Gorbachev had suffered the same fate as many Soviet retirees, who had looked forward to generous pensions only to find themselves forced to hustle and scrape to get by as the Russian economy collapsed around them—shrinking by 30 percent between 1991 and 1998. The foundation, too, was tottering, with even Gorbachev’s significant lecture fees unable to sustain both his family and the foundation and its staff, let alone any projects he might want to pursue to leave a legacy. Even generous donations from Ted Turner only went so far.
Gorbachev was determined to stay in Russia and fight for reform, not to take up a life of well-compensated exile abroad. To do that, he would need money to fund his center, his staff, and his activities—urgently. As Gorbachev later told France 24 when asked about the ad, “I needed to finish the building. The workers started to leave—I needed to pay them.”
To keep his vision going—and to stay relevant in a world moving beyond him—he would need a lot of money. More, even, than he could make by giving lectures. More than anyone in Russia could, or wanted to, give him.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa Gorbachev, talk to journalists during their visit to St. Petersburg in April 1994. (Future Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen just behind them.) Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
As the Soviet Union shrank, Pizza Hut expanded.
The American firm had broken into the Soviet Union just before it died, thanks in part to Gorbachev’s policies of openness. That’s one reason why the commercial could exist in the first place: It was filmed on location in a Moscow Pizza Hut near Red Square, which had opened in 1990 as part of a Soviet-era deal with the chain’s then-parent company, PepsiCo. That arrangement, which had been hailed as the “deal of the century,” flopped when the Soviet Union collapsed, killing both the Russian economy and the restaurant’s supply chain. (Overnight, Lithuanian mozzarella became an expensive import from a foreign country.)
That connection helped provide the hook that Pizza Hut’s advertising creatives needed. For the advertising firm BBDO, Pizza Hut was a big client in a challenging category. Conveniently for BBDO, that translated into big-budget commercials. Pizza Hut ordered dozens of ads a year from BBDO, with a mixture of ordinary TV spots touting weekly specials and major campaigns featuring spokespeople like Dennis Rodman and Donald Trump.
Keeping such a big client happy was a priority for the firm. By 1997, Pizza Hut’s international arm was looking for new spokespeople. As a global brand, then-Pizza Hut advertising executive Scott Helbing recalled in an interview, the company “needed an idea that truly traveled across continents” for “a truly global campaign that would play in any country in the world.”
Former BBDO art director Ted Shaine, who helped create the ad with Tom Darbyshire, a young copywriter at the time, recalled that BBDO “heard that [Gorbachev] was willing to do something.” Others suggest that somebody at BBDO came up with the idea and sought Gorbachev out.
However it happened, the core idea of the ad remained stable throughout the monthslong process of negotiating and filming it. It would not focus on Gorbachev but on an ordinary Russian family eating at Pizza Hut. It would be shot on location, featuring as many visuals that screamed “Russia” as possible.
The concept obviously exploited the shock value of having a former world leader appear. But the ad played on the fact that Gorbachev was far more popular outside Russia than inside it. As late as October 1991, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 54 percent of Americans wanted to see Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet Union, compared with only 18 percent for Yeltsin. And warm feelings toward Gorbachev persisted in the West long after the Soviet Union dissolved. “In contrast to his unpopular standing at home,” the political scientist Andrew Cooper writes in Diplomatic Afterlives, “Gorbachev retained superstar standing abroad as a visionary statesman.” At home, Gorbachev was a pariah. Abroad, he was an elder statesman and celebrity, far more beloved than the buffoonish Yeltsin.
Actually brokering the deal took months. Katie O’Neill Bistrian, now chief marketing officer of the collaborative workspace firm Work Well Win, took on the role of representing Gorbachev. Then in her mid-20s and a firebrand executive at the sports and talent management company IMG who routinely brokered deals for stars like Derek Jeter, she viewed the Gorbachev deal as something that she could execute.
There was a hitch: IMG didn’t actually represent Gorbachev. Nobody did. O’Neill Bistrian’s first challenge, then, was to work through contacts, particularly IMG head Mark McCormack, to connect to people in Gorbachev’s circle to broker the deal.
The negotiations took months. Partly, this represented a negotiating tactic: The longer the negotiations drew out, the higher Gorbachev’s talent fee would be. But it also represented real hesitation on Gorbachev’s part.
Taubman argues that Gorbachev’s loss of station and purpose hit his wife, Raisa Gorbachev, hard, not least because it meant that the betrayals of 1991 were compounded by public criticism and even charges of treason. Raisa likely feared that the Pizza Hut ad could only further harm his reputation. On the other hand, only international sources could provide the funds that Gorbachev needed. (The exact amount that Gorbachev would receive for the commercial is secret, but it may have been one of the largest talent fees in history—an amount that would be easily in the seven figures today, adjusted for inflation.)
While Gorbachev’s circle prolonged the negotiations, O’Neill Bistrian told BBDO that another figure was available: Muhammad Ali. IMG had just begun to represent the once-polarizing figure, who, by the 1990s, had transformed into a beloved national icon. Pizza Hut and BBDO leapt at the chance. (Concluding both the Gorbachev and Ali deals would get O’Neill Bistrian her own endorsement deal, for Samsung monitors—the only trace of O’Neill Bistrian’s involvement in the deal until now.)
Gorbachev finally assented—with conditions. First, he would have final approval over the script. That was acceptable. Second, he would not eat pizza on film. That disappointed Pizza Hut. “We always wanted the hero of the ad to eat the pizza,” Helbing said.
Gorbachev held firm. “‘As the ex-leader, I just would not,’” Helbing recalled Gorbachev saying.
O’Neill Bistrian suggested a compromise: A family member would appear in the spot instead. Gorbachev’s granddaughter Anastasia Virganskaya ended up eating the slice. Pizza Hut accepted.
At last, filming could begin. Helbing, Shaine, Darbyshire, O’Neill Bistrian, the director Peter Smillie, and several others flew to Moscow in November 1997. Preproduction (casting, costuming, and location scouting) took several days before principal photography, which took place over two days—one for the exterior shots and one for the interior scenes.
BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.
(Incidentally, Red Square seems to have been chosen more for cinematic needs than for veracity. The commercial shows a Pizza Hut storefront on Red Square itself, but that’s fake—the Russian signage behind several Pizza Hut logos establishes that the door Gorbachev and Virganskaya are filmed entering is actually a jewelry store.)
The team encountered challenges. “The weather was horrible,” Shaine recalled: low light, bitterly cold, and not even enough snow to make Red Square look as Americans felt it should—until a couple of inches fell on the day of the shoot itself. Worse, it wasn’t clear that the commercial would even happen. After months of reluctance to agree to the shoot, Gorbachev arrived late, the first of a few occasions when the BBDO team thought the agreement might collapse. (When the former leader arrived at Red Square, Shaine greeted Gorbachev by saying, “Well, this is a big production we’re involved in.” “I know,” Gorbachev replied through his interpreter. “I’ve been to many big productions in this place.”)
Filming the interior scenes took the better part of a day in a different location, inside a real Moscow Pizza Hut. (Even though the bulk of the commercial is just a conversation around a table, multiple sources stressed that filming such a scene—with its complicated sightlines—is enormously challenging.) Coincidentally, it also happened to be Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Since the commercial was being shot at a working Pizza Hut, the cast and crew—including Gorbachev—ate pizza, which was “one of the most interesting Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever had,” said Shaine, who was seated with Gorbachev.
In b-roll shot during the production, Helbing interviewed Gorbachev on camera. Gorbachev justified his decision to do the commercial on two grounds. First, the former leader argued, “pizza is for everyone.” It was nicely communal: “It’s not only consumption. It’s also socializing.”
But the more important reason, Gorbachev confessed, was that he needed the money.
The Gorbachev commercial wasn’t just a piece of advertising ephemera. It was also a multimillion-dollar short film—and the creators were as concerned with artistic standards as selling pizza. Besides the expense and effort of the shoot and the postproduction (an original score recorded live!), the dialogue is entirely in Russian with English subtitles—even though Americans hate subtitles.
The aim of these choices was to show Pizza Hut as a global brand with, as Helbing calls it, a “gravitas” that Little Caesars or Domino’s couldn’t match. To do that, Darbyshire and Shaine tried to capture a story that would reflect Russian reality—not just American stereotypes.
Yuval Weber, the Bren chair of Russian military and political strategy at Marine Corps University’s Krulak Center, uses the commercial as a primary document in his classes in Russian history to illustrate the stresses of the transition from communism. Weber argues that Darbyshire and Shaine succeeded maybe even better than they knew at depicting Russian life at that moment. “You have the fundamental note of hope from the American side, that basically pizza or Western culture can solve the really intractable problems of Russian politics,” Weber said. “You have the Russians depicting a legitimate family—a stylized family dispute on something important. The actors themselves are portraying very real stereotypes about contemporary Moscow.”
“The disagreement about the big issues totally would have been plausible describing the Moscow intelligentsia that those actors are portraying in the commercial itself,” Weber said. “My guess, based on the clothes that the actors chose or that the costume designers chose, is that grandmother is clearly a philologist, some sort of drama teacher, literature teacher, foreign-language teacher. Dad? He’s an engineer of some type. The son is a businessman. And they represent the ’50s generation, the ’70s generation, and the ’90s generation. That would have been beyond an American audience, but … I’ve always thought the actors brought [those choices].”
You can also read the ad as a metatextual comment on itself. As Helbing observed: “If you see the spot and hear what they’re kind of saying about what he’s brought, that was truly what those actors were discussing. We would never have been sitting in that Pizza Hut with Gorbachev eating a pizza if it hadn’t been for what he had done.”
With filming concluded, the Americans flew back to the States. The footage went to Clayton Hemmert, an editor and co-founder of the firm Crew Cuts, who had the task of assembling a narrative from the raw footage. “When you get down to it,” Hemmert said, “you have hundreds of thousands, millions, of frames of film that could be juxtaposed in any order and put any sound behind it, so your options are tremendous.” His smooth cutting of music and dialogue gave the ad its chaotic, argumentative energy.
Hemmert played a key role in shaping the ending. “If you listen to that sound ‘Hail to Gorbachev,’ it sounds like the entire nation of Russia is chanting ‘Hail to Gorbachev,’” Hemmert said. The commercial closes with the cheers resounding throughout Red Square and then all of Moscow in progressively wider shots with celebratory music underneath. “It has this impression, you might say the illusion, that the entire nation feels this is a wonderful thing that happened.”
Of course, it is an illusion—in this case, taking the actor’s dialogue, adding reverb, and layering the chants over each other. But it’s also one that suited both the marketing needs of Pizza Hut and the myth-making needs of Gorbachev. Pizza Hut gets to be not only the avatar of global capitalism but also the restaurant that brings people together. In the commercial’s fiction, at least, Gorbachev gets the hero’s reception that Raisa always thought he deserved.
Yet the commercial itself is more open-ended than it might appear on first viewing. “At the very end, when everyone is saying ‘Za Gorbacheva,’ it resounds throughout Moscow and all the landmarks. But the last shot was an old lady, a babushka, dressed in black who basically looks into a great distance. And in a sense, it’s played for laughs. But that’s also her looking off into the future, which is still unclear,” Weber said.
The future turned out to be much dimmer than the ad anticipated. A little less than a year after the ad was filmed, in August 1998, the Russian financial system collapsed. The economic recovery that had begun to take hold was wiped out. As the Moscow Timeswrote, “The whole Russian economy fell to pieces at a stroke.”
Weber reflected on what that might have meant for the fictional family in the commercial. “They would have been the ones crushed. The son, he’s exactly the sort of guy who would have been overleveraged. Dad isn’t in great shape. Grandmother hangs on but in worse shape because grandson probably can’t support her as much,” he said. Whatever optimism made the pro-Gorbachev slant of the ad even dimly plausible as a representative sampling of Muscovite opinion vanished. News reports suggest that the Pizza Hut location in which the commercial was filmed itself closed during the crash.
And that means that this fictional family, like most Russians, probably spent the early 2000s supporting the increasingly hard-line Vladimir Putin, seeing him as “the only person who can take them back to stability and potential for growth,” Weber said. Out with pizza, in with the vertical of power.
Everyone with whom I spoke about making the commercial remembers it fondly. They got to meet a world leader; they succeeded in drawing attention to the brand; and the commercial received a unexpected second life online, keeping their work alive in a profession where most product is disposable.
For Gorbachev, however, the ad’s legacy seems less bright—mostly because he never found the path he’d meant for it to fund. The commercial funded his foundation and loyal retainers for a while. Yet a year later, he told the Guardian that he had lost his own savings in the 1998 crash. Raisa died of cancer in 1999. And despite Gorbachev’s ambitions that his post-presidency could push his country toward greater openness, Russia has slipped ever further along a much less free path than he once envisioned.
This year, Putin commemorated two decades in power. A tightening of laws on foreign support for nonprofits inside Russia squeezed the Gorbachev Foundation; many of his family members have reportedly moved to Germany. In a book released last month, Gorbachev even weakly offered praise for his successor on the grounds that Putin “inherited chaos” and that his moves could be justified if “the aim of authority is to create conditions for developing a strong modern democracy.”
For Russians, the debate about his legacy that the ad foregrounded has been conclusively resolved. In a 2018 poll by the respected Levada Center (another byproduct of Gorbachev’s reforms), 66 percent of Russians responded that they regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, of course, does Gorbachev. His ambition was to perfect the country, not to end it.
Yet Russians seem to blame him for the catastrophe. A 2017 Levada poll found that only 1 percent of Russians expressed admiration for Gorbachev, 30 percent professed to dislike him, and 13 percent said their overall attitude was one of disgust or hatred. (Yeltsin, who died in 2007, received almost identical ratings.) As a leader, Russians rank Gorbachev well below Joseph Stalin.
No Russian crowd, in other words, is going to chant “Hail to Gorbachev!” anytime soon.
