Pizza Hut Manaus (or ‘how not to design a building’)

Whoever was responsible for the interior design of the Pizza Hut in Manaus, should be awarded the Architectural Ineptitude Award 2008. It must have taken a huge amount of thought to produce an interior totally devoid of curves, and an immense amount of dedication to select only materials with absolutely no sound deadening qualities at all, in order to generate that special fish-market-on-a-Wednesday-morning sound quality. Admittedly there were more than 4 customers when we were there, which is probably the minimum number required to really start to get the right effect of the clash of bouncing, echoing, harsh metallic sounds whizzing around and through you. It’s like the orchestra forgot to bring its instruments and decided to talk and shout its way through the 1812 overture instead.

As for the food, well, things are a lot better. The Pizzas almost taste the same as the PH standard, although of course the cheeses are made up from some crazy local recipe of flavoured rubber, and they don’t (at least didn’t) have any garlic (at all), and their version of pepperoni (I wonder about the etymology of the word – one might think it had something to do with PEPPER, but I could be wrong), just isn’t. Oh – and they don’t do Coca-Cola – just Pepsi (maybe that’s a PH-wide phenomenon now, I don’t know). AND they don’t serve wine (well why would you – after all, I can’t think that anyone would ever consider drinking wine with pizza or pasta, can you?).

Anyway, apart from that, it’s a really great place.