Sunday, July 18, 2021

The Big Shef According to Peter


During the pandemic, the list of places to which I could safely travel shrank drastically, as it did for most responsible people. I largely limited my adventures to Southeastern Michigan, and my meals to drive thrus. I’d take at least one long drive just about every weekend, exploring roads and towns that I had never seen before despite them being so close to the area I’ve called home off and on for nearly a decade. I also quickly developed favorite local locations of fast food chains during my localized adventures. For instance, my favorite Dairy Queen is the one in Hamburg, Michigan because it’s one of the few Grill and Chill locations in the area, and driving there on surface streets is an adventure through the gradual transition of the urban sprawl of Metro Detroit to sparsely populated countryside. The same Eight Mile road made famous by Marshall Mathers is paved in mud and gravel and lined with dense trees in the last couple of miles before it reaches the outskirts of Hamburg. My favorite Jimmy John’s in Dundee was a little more straightforward. It’s location at the confluence of US 23 and M-50 made it convenient to routes I’d often find myself on during my aimless weekend drives, and unlike most Jimmy John’s locations in the area, it had a drive thru, meaning that I could satiate my occasional craving for a Vito, or Club Lulu without having to go inside and breathe the same air as other humans. But after a long year of exploring my backyard and drive thru meals, I was vaccinated, and suddenly, my world was again near the size it was before things got weird. I took full advantage and quickly took the multistate road trip that I’ve been writing about in dribs and drabs for the past few weeks, and thanks to that road trip, I can happily report that I have a new favorite Burger Chef.


I say that with acute awareness of how ludicrous it would have sounded a few short years ago. I adhered to the conventional wisdom that Burger Chef, once the second largest fast food chain in the US behind McDonald’s, was dead. The last restaurant to use the name ceased doing so in 1996 when its franchise agreement, the final Burger Chef franchise agreement, expired. The 2015 closure of Schroeder’s Drive-In, a Burger Chef in all but name in Danville, Illinois, thought by many to be the last Burger Chef was widely lamented, but a 1,000+ unit restaurant chain doesn’t go down that easily, even nearly 40 years after Burger Chef’s fate was ostensibly sealed with its acquisition by what was then Hardee’s parent company, there are still thinly disguised Burger Chefs hanging on. Research and reader tips have led me to two surviving bootleg Burger Chefs that are still in operation today, first Suzi’s Hamburgers in South Charleston, West Virginia, and later, The Chef in Cleveland, Tennessee, and I’m no less astounded to have tracked down a third surviving Burger Chef by a different moniker, Pete’s Burgers and More in Reidsville, North Carolina.


Pete's still retains the distinctive Burger Chef covered drive thru. 

Pete’s had been on my to-visit list since a planned trip to the Carolinas had to be called off in the spring of 2020 for obvious reasons. I was therefore eager to experience it for myself, perhaps a little too eager, as I arrived in Reidsville nearly an hour before Pete’s 10 AM open time. I occupied myself with a side quest to a nearby Food Lion where I picked up a couple of 12 packs of Cheerwine, a regionally-available cherry soda that’s abundant in North Carolina but elusive back home in Michigan. Even with an impromptu grocery run, I had to sit in Pete’s parking lot watching the clock in my car and the open sign on the door as a throng of uniformed employees walked across the lot in front of me and into the building to make preparations to open for the day. The building itself retained the formal facade that many Burger Chefs adopted in the 1970s while they were owned by General Foods, eschewing the funky birdhouse look of the 1950s and ‘60s, and adding a distinctive covered drive thru lane that makes Burger Chef buildings from this era easily identifiable. Just as my pondering of Burger Chef architecture and history was beginning to distract me from my eagerness to eat at Pete’s, an employee unlocked the front door, my signal that they were open for business.


Pete's has a decidedly modern order counter. 

Ordering at a bootleg Burger Chef is always an exercise in code breaking. Unable to use copyrighted names for Burger Chef menu items like the Big Shef, Super Shef, and Chicken Club, restaurant owners must give these sandwiches new, but still recognizable names, much the same way they changed the names of their restaurants, and often little else, when their final Burger Chef franchise agreements expired. In this case, the code was easy to decipher, at least in the case of the Big Shef and Super Shef, which at Pete’s were called the Big Burger and Super Burger. I ordered one of each and two apple pies in hopes they’d resemble the Burger Chef apple pies which apparently had cinnamon on top and frosting on the bottom. As I waited for my order, I examined my surroundings in search of any other vestigial signs of the Burger Chef brand.



A 1970s era Burger Chef Works Bar, still in service at Pete's
An up close view of the toppings; I might add onions and jalapeños to my next Big Shef

I didn’t have to look far, as at one corner of the dining room was an original Burger Chef self-serve works bar where picky eaters could dress their own sandwiches after ordering them plain. (Roy Rogers adopted a similar setup around the same time and still uses it today, though I’m unsure who did it first.) The addition of coleslaw, which is treated as a condiment as well as a side dish in the Carolinas was the only apparent deviation from General Foods era Burger Chef standards. Furthermore, I was able to date the building thanks to a couple of oddly slanted pillars just in front of the order counter that described the outline of the distinctive pentagonal window on the building’s original facade before it was expanded forward sometime in the 1970s to expand the dining room. This meant that the building was built to be a Burger Chef. I also noticed a large, prominently displayed sign advertising a birthday club for kids. This may be a tenuous connection, but it reminded me of the innovation of the Burger Chef brand, as Burger Chef was the first fast food chain to offer a kids’ meal, and even once (unsuccessfully) sued McDonald’s for ripping off the innovation. Burger Chef also pioneered the combo meal with their “Triple Treat,” and while they didn’t invent the double deck hamburger, they at least had the idea to rip off Big Boy with their own Big Shef before McDonald’s did the same and introduced the Big Mac.


This...
...and this...

...would have once had windows between them and looked something like this former Burger Chef in Northern Indiana.


I was again snapped out of my Burger Chef-history induced trance when my order number was called, and I returned to my table with my newly acquired historically significant fast food. I’ve now been to enough Burger Chefs that I can comment on the various common and diverging attributes of each locations’ modern interpretation of the Big Shef. Even when Burger Chef was a going concern, their offerings were not terribly consistent. Depending on when and where you walked into a Burger Chef and ordered a Big Shef, you’d receive a two-patty burger with a single slice of cheese on a three piece bun dressed with shredded lettuce and a Miracle Whip-based tartar sauce, but the bun may or may not have had sesame seeds on it, and the patties may have been flame broiled or simply cooked on a electric flat top griddle. Unsurprisingly, the modern Burger Chef holdouts that have been operating independently since the early 1980s, are no more consistent than their forebears. For instance, Suzi’s version of the Big Shef is cooked on a flattop and has a seeded bun, while at The Chef, the Big Shef is flame broiled and on a seedless bun. Both buns are split into the distinctive three slices known as the crown (top) club (center) and heel (bottom). Pete’s version the Big Shef offers a third, heretofore unseen iteration of a modern Big Shef. Its bun is seeded but lacks the club center layer. Its patties are flame broiled but have an extra slice of American cheese, but the special sauce retains the tangy zip of Miracle Whip that makes it a recognizable Big Shef.


That's a good Shef!

At this point, I’ve thrown around the term “flame broiled” enough that you’re probably wondering if Burger Chef was an imitator of Burger King or vice versa. There was a stronger connection than simple imitation. Burger Chef’s parent company was a manufacturer of restaurant supplies before they launched the Burger Chef restaurant brand in the mid 1950s. They produced a device known as the Insta Broiler that they both supplied to Burger King and used in Burger Chef locations in a time when the Miami-based Insta Burger King as they were then known and the Indianapolis-based Burger Chef were fledgling chains and not direct competitors in the same geographical territory.


I'd join the Pete's Birthday Club in second if I were 25 years younger. 


When discussing Burger Chef with my fellow millennials who have not experienced it firsthand, I often describe it as a better version of Burger King, and that description rang true when I tasted Pete’s version of the Super Shef, a quarter pound flame broiled burger dressed with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, ketchup, and mustard. It tasted like a Whopper as Super Shefs tend to do, but this one in particular tasted like a Whopper prepared at an especially well-run Burger King. I was born too late to experience Burger Chef in their heyday, but in my idealized version of the past, I like to think that Super Shefs were always as well executed as the one I had at Pete’s Burgers and More.

Super Shef: like a Whopper, but good

The fried apple pies sadly lacked the frosting on the bottom, but I suspect that The Chef in Tennessee may offer a pie that’s closer to the original Burger Chef formulation. I’ve long had plans to make a return trip there to investigate further. Still there was one menu item at Pete’s that I hadn’t ordered that intrigued me. After finishing my initial order, I returned to the order counter and asked what was on a “Chicken Sandwich Deluxe.” the guy working the counter informed me that it came with lettuce, tomato, mayo, and most importantly, bacon. It was a renamed Burger Chef chicken club. I ordered one to go, and unable to contain my excitement of finding another Burger Chef menu item, I outed myself as a weirdo and told a few semi-interested folks working the counter about my odd hobby of visiting surviving locations of mostly defunct restaurant chains, this very blog that describes my adventures, and that I had driven from Michigan to eat there. I rewarded their mild interest with Broken Chains stickers (Available for sale here!) and profuse thanks as I took my chicken club to the parking lot for examination and consumption, washing it down with a warm can of Cheerwine from the back of my car.



My Chicken Club came in what appeared to be a wrapper from Doc Hopper's. 


I felt an exuberant fulfillment. I had finally made it to the bootleg Burger Chef of Reidsville, North Carolina, and it seemed to offer a good many of Burger Chef’s greatest hits, combining the flame broiling of the ‘50s and ‘60s with the works bar of the 1970s as well as the semi-obscure Chicken Club. There’s also a fish sandwich on the menu, that I suspect bears a meaningful resemblance to Burger Chef’s Fishermans’ Fillet, which I’ll have to try and order on a return trip, which I’m currently preparing to make.


This Burger Chef logo may look vaguely familiar to Broken Chains readers. 


I encourage anyone reading this to visit any of the three holdout Burger Chefs I’ve mentioned here, but if you can only go to one, I’d recommend Pete’s. They’ve seemingly distilled everything that was good about Burger Chef into a package that feels modern, yet distinctive. I’ve previously posited that The Chef offers a glimpse into what Burger Chef was like in the ‘60s and Suzi’s feels more like Burger Chef in the ‘70s. But perhaps most intriguingly, Pete’s Burgers and More feels like alternative history. With its collection of positive attributes from varying points in the brand’s history it has the feel of what Burger Chef could have been, and maybe what Burger Chef would have been like if the brand had survived mismanagement in the ‘70s and the sale to Hardee’s in the ‘80s to survive today. 


If you’re a Burger Chef fan and/or a fast food history geek like I am, be sure to check out my new pal Darren’s Burger Chef Podcast in which he delves into the history of the Burger Chef brand and has intriguing interviews with people connected to the Burger Chef brand. 







11 comments:

  1. Peter, Peter, burger eater 🍔

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  2. You should have tried the big burger, its made like the first burger you spoke of that was missing the 3rd piece of bread. Its like a 10x better version of a big Mac with shredded lettuce, the special sauce 2 patties and 3 piece bun.

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  3. Burger Chef! Alas, my all time favorite burger joint growing up in the Detroit Downriver area!

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  4. Are there many Cicis Pizzas left after the Pandemic? Do any Fazolis still exist? Godfathers Pizza Any of those would be my recommends.

    Also apologies if those are places you've covered before!

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    1. I know of several Godfather's Pizzas in Virginia and West Virginia, mostly attached to gas stations.

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    2. Wikipedia says there are 297 Cici's left (they've dropped the "Pizza" from their name), and that may go down as they filed for Chapter 11 earlier this year.

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  5. In the Muppet "It's a Wonderful Life" movie they have a menu of Doc Hopper's in a mall Kermit visits in the alternate reality.

    http://www.carbon-izer.com/features/muppets/sir%20burger%20not%20appearing%20in%20this%20film.png

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  6. +1 for getting the Cheerwine, although I have to say that it's a lot better cold. This place is an hour from me. Gotta decide if it's worth the drive, because I don't go to Reidsville very much.

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  7. I'm so excited to have found your blog. Burger Chef was so good! I find myself craving their burger will the special dill sauce. We are now in 2023, I wonder if these are still up and running? I live in Florida and it seems this calls for a hometown visit to Ohio. I'm kicking myself because during many drives north we would stop overnight in Cleveland TN! If only I had known!!! Next trip I will stop in Cleveland, maybe hit North Carolina and just maybe make the drive to West Virginia! Please keep your blog going! These restaurants we long for because of the great food from a much happier time and nostalgia memories we crave!

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  8. Hello! I was just researching Burger Chef (also came across some old commercials and shared with my brothers!) and came across this blog. I'm so glad that I did! Although the restaurants mentioned are nowhere near where I'm currently residing (FL) I'll keep in mind that when we're on a road trip to stop and visit the restaurant in North Carolina. I grew up in the mid-west (St. Louis area) and going to Burger Chef was a treat for us when our parents took us. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insight on this famous restaurant!

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