Giving Pizza Hut a run for its money

We used to avoid fast-food restaurants, especially Pizza Hut cos there was just something about the American-style thick bready crust pizza and fluorescent yellow cheese that was a big turn-off. Italian pizzas with their thin, chewy crust and minimal cheese, however, was a different story altogether!

However, to give pizza joints a second chance, my siblings suggested Dominos for dinner on Saturday night. But since we were nowhere near a Dominos and right outside a Shakeys, we opted for that instead. By the way, Dominos has bought over Shakeys but I'm not sure if their food is the same now or whether they've maintained each outlet's originality.

Shakeys brings back warm childhood memories of standing on a chair to drink their strawberry milkshake which was too tall for 3-year-old me. Their menu, however, is now a far cry from those days where all they had were pizzas. Now it caters to everyone in the family, from the grandparents with their offer of Chicken Rice to the kids!

This was the large pizza with everything on. They have options for normal or thin crust and naturally we opted for the latter. It isn't as thin as Italian-crust pizza but it was rather tasty and sufficiently crispy. There was just enough cheese to create that long cheese tendrils effect when picking up the pizza slices! And they weren't too stingy with toppings.

We also shared a 2 piece chicken rice combo meal. It comes with a soup, soft drink and this plate of chicken rice. The soup was self-service and it was amusing to see a "No Free Refill" sign at the soup counter!

The savoury chicken rice was nice and fluffy and tasted like beryani rice! The 2 pieces of chicken arrived piping hot and were really good. It was crispy on the outside and deliciously soft and juicy inside. A bonus was that little saucer of sambal to go with the chicken rice. It was not too spicy but tasty and made a good complement to the meal.

We tried dipping our pizza ends in it as an experiment and to our surprise, worked pretty well too! They had dessert add-ons for only RM3.90 for banana splits, apple crumbles and sundaes. The apple crumble was very tempting but unfortunately, we had no more space left to fit it in.

Dinner was really quite a pleasant surprise as we didn't expect much of Shakeys, it being a fast-food outlet. But after that night, we now understand why the outlets are always full of families, especially on weekends!