The foyer of the Concord Pizza Hut was built for waiting, so Brittany Bishop would sit and watch and wait.
Customers around her grew impatient expecting their pizzas, sharing the upholstered burgundy bench by the entrance, which for the average patron functioned as a holding pen for hungry people.
But six-year-old Bishop enjoyed the vantage point it gave her. She could crane her neck intermittently to catch a glimpse of the uniformed waitresses hustling, balancing, scribbling, dominating the dining room with competence and grace. Through the commotion, she could spot her mom whenever she rounded the corner.
“I saw her as a mom all the time, but we’d go to Pizza Hut and she’d be a different person. In the early days, especially, they were constantly busy. It was crazy to watch my mom work, how fast she needed to work; being at home was much slower. Watching her run over to a table and take orders and remember them — she hardly ever had to write anything down. She had a crazy memory. She could always do 20 million things at once,” Bishop said.
Her mother, Melissa Roberts, worked at the restaurant for more than three decades, from 1985 to 2020. And so did her mother before her: Merilee Ellsworth, who waitressed at the same Pizza Hut location from 1975 until 1995, when she moved to Arizona.
Bishop, who today is a stay-at-home mom living in Epsom, also had her turn participating in the quasi-family business during a couple of two-year stints in the 2010s.
Affectionate memories of the Loudon Road pizzeria bind three generations of women.
The location shut down on Sunday, Aug. 23, just months after Pizza Hut’s parent company, Yum Brands, announced it would sell the chain, excluding assets on mainland China, to the private equity firm LongRange Capital for $1.5 billion. Yum China Holdings Inc. would buy the remaining properties for approximately $1.2 billion.
“There were a lot of families. There were a lot of generations that worked there for quite a while, not just our family,” Bishop said. “We have some ties there, and it’s sad to see it go.”
In the 80s, basketball games at Pembroke Academy called for dinners at Pizza Hut. Roberts remembers the feverish energy: “Friday and Saturday nights, you’d be lucky to find a place to park,” she said. Oftentimes, her mom wouldn’t arrive home until 2:30 or 3 a.m.
They both stayed the course, worked years of demanding night shifts, for the same purpose.
While her husband worked to pay living expenses, Ellsworth put her money toward invigorating that life. She spent the day with her children, showing up for their after-school commitments, lounging by the lake in the summertime, and she worked as a waitress at night. The part-time work financed sports, instrument lessons and vacations.
“My mom started when I was like 10, and my brothers had just been born. After a couple of years, my brothers’ birthday parties were there, and sometimes, we would go in for dinner just to see her,” Roberts said.
At age 16, Roberts took her first job washing dishes at the same Pizza Hut. It was short-lived. Six months into the gig, management imposed a rule prohibiting family members from working together, so Roberts quit and only returned in 1985, after the rule had been reversed.
Early in her marriage, she’d informed her husband she didn’t intend to place their children in daycare. When the time came and those children arrived, night shifts at Pizza Hut gave the couple the ability to swap their kids and the restaurant’s large, collegial staff allowed Roberts the flexibility to take time off as needed.
Bishop’s memories of this era live in a place of nostalgia and innocence.
After dance lessons in Penacook — jazz, hip hop and tap — she and her sister, accompanied by their dad, would visit Roberts at Pizza Hut for dinner.
The fact that her mother worked there imbued the restaurant with a feeling of ownership and conferred Bishop with certain privileges. Years of riffing on menu items helped her hone informed preferences. The pizza sauce she never quite liked, but she could bathe in the breadstick dipping sauce, with its thinner consistency and sweeter notes. Cheese breadsticks with toppings like pepperoni and green peppers became her proudest inventions.
“We would walk in, and everyone would know who we were,” Bishop said. “Walking into Pizza Hut growing up, it was almost like a second home.”
The changes, some of them omens, were small enough at first. Around the turn of the millennium, Pizza Hut transitioned to baking pizzas from frozen disks of pre-prepared dough. Bishop remembers the fresh dough, handmade each morning at individual locations across America, as fluffier and crisper. Frozen doughs, she thought, “didn’t taste right.”
As home delivery progressed from a popular convenience to the standard medium of consumption, the dine-in business began its decline.
By the start of the pandemic, Roberts had taken on a second job at the Department of Motor Vehicles. It was an effort to try something different, she said, her very first office job as she neared her 60s.
Soon, she heard that sales had dropped significantly and the restaurant no longer needed as many waitresses. She worked her last shift in 2020.
‘Ten or 15 years ago, it just kind of — things shifted. People didn’t go and sit in restaurants. Then, it was deliveries, then COVID happened,” Roberts said. “We knew that they needed renovations and that they didn’t want to put money into the building. You wonder if they weren’t doing as well as before. It was the same decor inside as forever, and after COVID, people didn’t go back.”
The men of the family help keep their tether to Pizza Hut tightly secured.
Bishop’s brother-in-law was a manager at the shuttered Concord location and will relocate to the location in West Lebanon, Bishop said. Her husband Topher’s connection to the establishment has become part of the family’s folklore, a small synchronicity that almost defies belief.
Topher Bishop grew up in Concord. When he introduced his parents to Roberts, his mother-in-law, she immediately recognized them as two of her former regulars.
“She remembered waiting on them,” Bishop said. “They always said his first solid food was a Pizza Hut breadstick, so we joke that my mom served my husband his first solid food.”
As far as the Bishops’ son, Benjamin, is concerned, the personal pan pizza is still the king of the hut.
