Impostor Pizza Hut, KFC and McDonalds: Hollywood recreates your fast food memories

The air smelled of yeast and cheese and grass, and although what I had in front of me looked like a personal document, pan pizza from Pizza Hut, it was actually a more expensive dupe.

Some of the pizzas' original flaws had been tweaked and squashed, like a favorite childhood memory. No veins of raw dough, no discouraging sweat of vegetable oil.

The best qualities of the original were exaggerated in a buttery, golden bottom and a thin, crackly edge, draped with confetti of light brown cheese. The puff and fluff of the dough was doubled, bubbly and light.

What's hard to explain is why this pizza, this imposter pizza felt more like a Pizza Hut pizza than the source material.

Chef Tim Hollingsworth prepared it for what he called Pizza Haute, one of the meticulous themed dinners he prepares. Chain in Los Angeles, a regular pop-up that views American fast food with an almost scholarly attention, exalting the genre through rigorous cooking and presentation.

Chain doesn't specialize in forensic foodie trompe loeils, those baroque lemon desserts made to look like real lemons until you cut them open, revealing layers of cream and cake. No, it's pizza disguised as pizza too.

It's a different kind of illusion: a restaurant that isn't really a restaurant, selling fast food that isn't really one? And it sent me a person who is not really a person? in a spiral. Was Chain celebratory and nostalgic or cynical and manipulative? Was it a marketing stunt, a performance or a loving rewriting of our culinary language? Was it an indulgent dip into the past or a glimpse into the future?

The chains' menus change, sometimes grouping brands into a super-range. This particular menu cost $75 per person, which got you cocktails in red Solo cups, plentiful and maybe even unlimited wine, a relic of a salad bar, and an ice cream station stocked with real blocks of Hunka Chunka PB Fudge and Butter Crunch Friendliesarrived from the East Coast.

Actor BJ Novak imagined Chain as a vibrant homage to chain foods. It first appeared in parking lots and alleys in 2020, then was operated in a West Hollywood home. In its early days, Chain might have appeared as a direct response to the darkness of the pandemic, anticipating the regression of taste that tends to follow very bad news like a surge in orders for buttered noodles, chicken tenders, mac and cheese, ice cream. ice cream sundaes.

Another way to look at it was that Hollywood was solving risks in the restaurant business, bringing in a talented chef to adapt existing culinary intellectual property to the McRibTHE Supreme CrunchwrapTHE king of bacon in the same way that a director might make a film around Barbie.

In January, Chain and its magnificent collection of vintage fast food knick-knacks moved to a larger space in Virgil Village, where it remains one of the hardest tables to land in the city. (The chain has held about 100 sold-out events since its launch, and the waiting list, which you sign up for by SMS request, has 25,000 names.)

We don't like to think of ourselves as a restaurant, said Nicholas Kraft, one of Chains' founders. It’s true that it’s both more ethereal than a restaurant and more established than a pop-up. And even if it's not a Instagram Museumit has the qualities of an immersive fictional business experience.

Ruth De Jong, a production designer who recently worked on Nope and Oppenheimer, helped design the look, blending a vintage Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders vibe with '90s arcade and video games and sleek original design : curved green lettering and red benches, elaborate plastic. self-referential advertising menus and posters. The effect is both shocking and sumptuous in a fast-food multiverse that seems to have always existed.

Before I left, I worried that Chain would feel like a pantomime, making fun of the restaurants she was referring to and the people who loved them. But there was a warmth to the place, a clear affection for the subject and its deep-seated pleasures. As I waited for the buzzer I was handed to go off, letting me know the pizzas were ready for pickup, I squeezed it too hard. The anxiety of missing the notification, the thrill when it buzzed! It was all very, very real.

Mr. Hollingsworth used a childhood memory as a reference point for the pizza dinner: the night he was stuck in a Pizza Hut in Houston during a flash flood. But like everyone else there, I brought my own references. By the end of the night, I felt like I'd been to an eccentric billionaires' party for which he had painstakingly recreated his last birthday from the summer before his parents divorced. The thoroughness. The precision. The sublimation of sorrow and desire.

Mr. Hollingsworth has a strong background in gastronomy. He was head chef at the French Laundry for years and now runs Hobbies in Los Angeles. But it cannot resist any agitation, no miniaturization, no textural transmutation, no construction that would make the dish unrecognizable. That's why it works. Technically the food is chef-driven, but the chef knows how to disappear.

Fancy fast-food remakes are nothing new, but they're rarely collaborations that support the company's branding efforts. In a mind-blowing ouroboros of marketing, Pizza Hut sponsored the pizza dinner at Chain, which also served as a promotion for the company's steak pizza. Food was an advertisement for food, which was also an advertisement.

But not all dishes are sponsored and so far, Chain hasn't provoked any corporate lawyers. For fun, Mr. Hollingsworth recently served a menu he called The Comeback Combo, inspired by beloved and discontinued produce. It included beef and suet fries, reminiscent of the ones McDonald's made until 1990, when the company switched to vegetable oil. He also created a look-alike for the Bell Beefer, a loose-meat sandwich from Taco Bell's early menus.

A recent Instagram post on the Chains account asked its followers for their thoughts on foods they were missing in retirement, hard to find, coming and going with the changes of our industrially regulated seasons.

People looked forward to Taco Bell's 7-layer burritos and McDonalds' fried apple pies. They missed Popeyess Cajun rice, KFC popcorn chicken, Wendys stuffed pitas, and Olive Gardens chicken alfredo pizza.

It was a public engagement exercise that brought out artifacts worth researching, a look into the past and the future. Here was the bottomless attic of ideas, the inexhaustible cannon of American food chains, intellectual property surviving in a blur of memory and marketing, which could be excavated and recreated forever. The nostalgia for the menus he would write, if we let him, was limitless.

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