I ate at the last remaining all-you-can-eat dine in Pizza Hut in Australia - and it's just how you remember it

I remember when this country was great.

It was a time when women pierced their belly buttons and men refused to talk about their feelings.

It was when there were no mobile phones, influencers or the option to work from home.

It was when property prices were low, disgruntled teenagers smoked cigarettes instead of vaping and footy players staggered around the field all game completely concussed with no medical intervention.

This simpler time - before everyone went woke - was the 1990s.

And one of the highlights of the decade was stuffing your face at Pizza Hut's all-you-can-eat buffet.

But like Mel Gibson - another 90s icon - I thought they'd all been cancelled by now.

It turns out one solitary restaurant still remains in Windsor, on the north-western outskirts of Sydney ... and it only costs $24.95 for all the pizza, pasta, salad and jelly-covered desert you can eat. It's even cheaper for kids, on weekends and for lunch.

I stepped through the doors and was immediately struck by warm feelings of comfort and nostalgia.

It's exactly how I remember it - with staff bustling through the dining room slapping down pizza's straight from the oven onto the heated buffet station.

The décor - which includes the original signage, seating booths and lino tiles from decades earlier - is so out of style it makes Velcro shoes and hypercolour t-shirts look cool.

But to me, it's perfect!

Franchise owner Santnam Ahuia, who took over the pizzeria with his wife Jenny in 2006, told Daily Mail Australia he wanted to keep the retro relic just like it was in its heyday.

'I've kept much of this Pizza Hut like it was when it was built in the 1980s because it just gives you that old feeling in your heart,' the 66-year-old Indian who moved to Australia in 1989 said.

'I think that's what people really like about it.'

While smorgasbord dining has largely gone out of vogue in Australia - particularly in the wake of the Covid pandemic - Mr Ahuia's Pizza Hut restaurant not only continues to survive, but thrive.

'I have people coming from hundreds of kilometres away to dine in,' Mr Ahuia said.

'From Katoomba to the Northern Beaches, the Central Coast - and we even had buses roll in from Newcastle.'

'People line up outside for an hour on Saturday night to dine here and during school holidays it's madness. We are so busy.'

It's easy to see why. The tucker is excellent.

And I should know because I had four plates loaded with meat lovers, pepperoni, Hawaiian, supreme and hot and spicy.

'How many slices have you had?' my photographer asked.

'Mate, I stopped counting after the second plate,' I told him.

Although I was struggling, it is all-you-can eat venue and I wanted to find out if Mr Ahuia's dessert station is how I remember it when I was an equally glutinous child.

I cranked on the soft-serve ice-cream machine, topped it off with fudge, Pizza Hut's iconic jelly cubes, marshmallows, sprinkles and chocolate sauce.

Then I went back for apple crumble... and sat in the car feeling ashamed but satisfied.

The truth is Australia's last-surviving dine-in Pizza Hut is unlikely to ever be a hit with the Ozempic-dependent celebrities of today - or the plague of trendy Instagrammers looking for the next inner-city hotspot - but I rate the experience five stars.

And if you want to make Australia great again, you should definitely check it out.