Pizza Hut is bringing back the red roof (and the salad bar)

Pizza Hut is bringing back the red roof. And the Tiffany lamp, and the red plastic cup, and the checkered tablecloth, and the Pac-Man machine in the corner that ate every quarter you had between ages 7 and 12 (mine still owes me money).

Yum! Brands announced this week that 155 Pizza Hut locations across the country are being converted back to the chain's full 1980s and 1990s look, complete with working jukeboxes and a salad bar that still has the little metal tongs. If, like me, you ate a Pan Pizza off a paper plate at any point during the Reagan or Clinton administrations, this one is for you.

The guy steering the project is Tim Sparks, president of Daland Corporation, a Kansas franchisee that runs nearly 100 Pizza Huts. Sparks started his career at the chain as a dishwasher (which feels exactly right), and he is now the one turning his stores into "Pizza Hut Classic" locations, with a few dozen already remodeled and more on the way. This is not a wallpaper job, either. The Classic spec calls for the full retro architectural package, which means some of these stores are getting brand-new gabled-roof buildings instead of a quick interior refresh.

All of this is happening while Pizza Hut is having a rough year. Domino's and every delivery app on your phone have been eating its lunch, and a bunch of underperforming stores are set to close. The Classic rollout is nostalgia and a rescue mission at the same time.

Pizza Hut is also reviving BOOK IT!, the reading rewards program that turned a generation of elementary schoolers into Personal Pan Pizza-motivated readers, and this summer's version runs through a mobile app where kids hit reading goals to earn a free pizza. I read like a maniac for those buttons, and I would do it again tomorrow.

People are already showing up, with families taking weekend road trips just to eat in a booth that looks like the one from their eighth birthday photo.

The pizza was always fine. The reason Pizza Hut lived rent-free in our heads for 30 years was the room itself, and the way your mom would slide a slice onto your plate before the cheese stopped dripping. A delivery app cannot do that.

A red roof can.