‘Pizza Hut Frank’ captures the attention of Erath County with his kindness and hard work.
Updated: Apr 15, 2021
Frank Brandenburg has become a local celebrity.
Despite icy roads and freezing temperatures, Frank’s determination to make it to work to run a local restaurant single-handedly for six hours on Monday has garnered him all kinds of attention on social media.
Yeah, this is Pizza Hut Frank, and if you are among the few people who still haven’t heard about him, his actions in the middle of this arctic freeze will warm your heart.
Frank is the 27-year-old general manager of Pizza Hut in Stephenville.
And when so many local businesses kept their doors closed on Monday, Frank did the opposite.
“I told my employees not to feel any pressure to come in,” he told Beneath the Surface News. “When I was driving to work, I noticed that everything was pretty much shut down, so I decided to try and do it myself so people had a place to get a hot meal.”
From noon to 6 p.m. on Monday, Frank took all the orders, made all the pizzas, then delivered them to customers waiting in the parking lot.
By the time help arrived that evening, Frank had single-handedly completed 45 orders.
Frank’s hard work and friendly disposition caught the attention of one of those customers – Micah Cardoza – a nurse with Stephens Home Health.
Micah told me that she hadn’t planned to order pizza on Monday, but when the hamburger she laid out for dinner failed to thaw, she and her husband started calling Pizza Hut.
“We couldn’t get through so we decided to down drive there,” she said. “There were cars in the parking lot and we saw this guy running back and forth bringing out pizzas and we stopped him and asked if they were open.”
That guy was Frank, of course, and he told Micah and her husband to pull into the drive-thru to place their order.
“When we pulled around, we noticed he was the only one working,” she said. “We couldn’t believe it. He was doing everything by himself and he was so nice.”
Later that evening, Micah gave Frank a shoutout on Facebook and the next morning the post had more than 1,000 comments.
So she headed back to Pizza Hut to find Frank.
“I told him he was famous and he had no idea what I was talking about,” Micah said. “He hadn’t seen the post because he had been working.”
Micah said so many people wanted to reward Frank for his dedication to the community, that she added his Venmo to a second post on Tuesday that reads: “It’s Pizza Hut Frank! He’s at it again today! Frank Brandenburg is a college graduate with a degree in business management, and is currently back at Tarleton for a degree in construction management! Frank is looking for a job that he can use his degree in! Let’s help Frank! His Venmo is @Frank-brandenburg.”
I spoke with Frank after he got off work Tuesday night, and I sensed pretty quickly that he isn’t comfortable with all the attention.
What he was more interested in talking about was the kindness he has experienced these past couple of days.
“The real story here is the kindness of the people of Stephenville,” he said. “We are having longer cook times, our internet went down twice today and people would show up to get their pizza and they weren’t ready, but everyone was nice and patient.”
But were they generous?
If I was going to get any sleep tonight, I had to know if those customers Frank worked so hard to help were generous with the tips.
“Oh yeah, everyone was great,” he said. “And very generous.”
After days of unrelenting cold, power outages, frozen pipes and a little misery, this was a story we all needed to hear.
I love that it was a 27-year-old hard working kid from Glen Rose who reminded us that kindness is the one thing that matters most, especially in trying times.
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