Death Awaits Us All

One of my earliest fast food memories was sitting at a tiny table under an anthropomorphic fiberglass apple tree opposite the ball pit, chowing down on my McNugget Happy Meal at my local McDonald’s. Another is pulling a free lollipop out of the hollow midsection of a seemingly larger than life Shoney Bear standee that towered over me at Shoney’s. Before the flame of my childlike wonder was snuffed out by a cynical world, I was mystified by a group of Chi-Chi’s employees gathered around my family’s table singing “Hey it’s your birthday” to the tune of “La Cucaracha” when I turned four. Across the street from the Lexington, Kentucky Chi-Chi’s at Darryl’s, sitting in the booth situated in an antique birdcage style elevator car was, and still is one of the highlights of my childhood. These early memories instilled in me an appreciation for a touch of whimsy in a dining experience. Well into my young adulthood a favorite weekend destination was Lambert’s Cafe, where hot yeasty rolls were thrown by servers from across the expansive dining room and customers would attempt, often successfully, to catch them at their tables. Now as a paunchy restaurant blogger with a mortgage and a bald spot, I find my favorite experiences are at restaurants that make a sincere attempt to make the dining experience fun and memorable. I was therefore excited to revisit Friendly’s.

I discovered Friendly’s a decade or so ago on a trip to a large antique mall housed in a former Hills department store in Northwestern Ohio. The size of the store and the long duration of the modern day treasure hunt that took place there meant that my companions and I would need to eat two meals nearby, so naturally we had both breakfast and lunch at the Friendly’s situated in an outlot of the former Hills. It was my first experience with the Friendly’s brand, and I was instantly a fan. Everything about the place was specifically curated to exude an aura of fun. The whimsically styled Cape Cod style building, the brightly colored drums of ice cream on display as you walked in the door, and the imaginative menu items were all designed to signal to diners that they were in a fun, friendly place. I recall having a fairly conventional breakfast that day, but marveled at the images of stacks of pancakes topped with ice cream on the menu. When I returned later in the day, I found the lunch menu just as novel. Everything had a unique and memorable name. Shakes were called Fribbles. There was something called a Fishamajig. It was the first time I had seen a burger that used grilled cheese sandwiches for buns, and indeed, that was exactly what I ordered before concluding the meal with two scoops of maple nut ice cream in a waffle cone brought to my table in a metal holder designed to keep the cone upright. I felt as if I had discovered a magical place. 

What I didn’t know at the time was that Friendly’s was on the verge of bankruptcy, which they officially declared in 2011. All Ohio locations closed not much later along with many others. History repeated itself last year when Friendly’s declared its second Chapter 11 flavor bankruptcy in less than a decade, but the chain has its roots in tough times. In 1935 brothers Prestley and Curtis Blake opened the Friendly ice cream shop in Springfield, Massachusetts at the height of the Great Depression. One shop became two shortly thereafter, and following World War Two, Friendly became a full blown restaurant chain gaining an apostrophe and S in the process to keep branding in line with what locals called the place. The chain peaked at over 800 locations. The Blake Brothers would retire and sell the Friendly’s empire to Hershey Foods in 1979, but both would live long enough to see the company declare bankruptcy at least once after bouncing around different owners over the next four decades. Curtis Blake died at age 102 in 2019, and his brother Prestley died earlier this year at the age of 106, mere weeks after it was announced that the restaurant investment firm Amici Partners Group LLC would be purchasing Friendly’s out of bankruptcy and supporting the remaining 119 locations mostly located in the Northeast and Midatlantic regions. 

A friendly place under a foreboding sky

Circumstances were such last week that I had a chance to travel to Maryland, home to what are now the nearest Friendly’s locations to me in Metro Detroit. My schedule allowed for only one stop, but I was determined to make it count. I settled on the Friendly’s in the Perry Hall area on the outskirts of Baltimore because it was a vintage freestanding Cape Cod building. It was a little bit further away from me than the bland strip mall location in Hagerstown, but the architecture more than justified the additional drive time. It was an unseasonably cold, damp, dreary day in late May when I arrived for breakfast on a Saturday morning. I had risen at 4 AM that day and driven 5 hours through the dark and fog to be there after attending a funeral the day before. I was ready for some classic Friendly’s brand whimsy to lighten my mood which was as dreary as the gray sky that hung over the Charm City. 

A photo from back before Friendly's got all possessive 

An adequate breakfast, proficiently prepared, but where's the flair?

I walked past the deserted outdoor serving window which would have been jammed with customers ordering ice cream to go on a warmer day and into the front door of the little Cape Cod, where I was quickly shown to a booth and handed a menu by a personable hostess/waitress. I reviewed the breakfast offerings with dismay to find there were no ice cream-topped pancakes to be found. Nothing looked whimsical or over the top. It was just a regular breakfast menu with regular boring breakfast food. Mildly disappointed, I ordered the silliest sounding thing I could, the “Big-Two-Do” and surveyed my surroundings. They were pleasant enough with photos of vintage Friendly’s locations on one wall and a mural of a stylized Fribble on another. The place at least looked fun. 

Want an easy laugh? Read this in your best old time radio announcer voice. 

Delicious is not an overstatement. Fun is, unless you follow breakfast with ice cream. 

Concluding my perfectly adequate but in no way distinctive breakfast, I reviewed the ice cream menu on my phone with the help of a handy QR code at my table and found that like the ice cream topped pancakes, my beloved maple nut flavor was gone from the menu. When my server returned, I ordered two scoops of the butter crunch flavor after she assured me that it wasn’t overly weird to order ice cream after breakfast. I was there to have fun after all. The ice cream that arrived a short while later in an old fashioned metal dish was my favorite part of the meal. The sweet yellow buttery scoops interspersed with crunchy bits of toffee was simple as ice cream goes, but the flavor was solid. Butter and sugar are the basis of literally every delicious baked good, so why shouldn’t there be an ice cream flavor based entirely around the combination? It was the perfect blend of whimsical, old fashioned, and excessive that I associate with the Friendly’s brand, but just as I was finishing scoop one and moving onto the second, I heard two members of the staff discussing the recent death of their former longtime manager. The spectre of doom and gloom had nearly caught up to me once again. 

This is what fun looks like. 

I had managed to find a little bit of joy in the new, austere Friendly’s menu, toned down by a pair of bankruptcies that came amid the deaths of their founders whose longevity was all the more remarkable given how much time they likely spent making, and eating ice cream. The over the top menu items were gone. The ice cream flavor list was shortened. My drive time to the nearest location had increased by a factor of six thanks to widespread closures, but there was still fun to be had. The flavor and texture of the ice cream was just enough to drown out the depressing conversation I was overhearing, and I still managed to leave in a noticeably better mood than when I had arrived. I think that’s the magic of Friendly’s. Even in its diminished state on an unseasonably cold and gloomy day at what I hope is the tail end of a cold and gloomy era with reminders of inevitable death lurking around every corner, a decent breakfast and couple scoops of ice cream brought to my table by a server whose demeanor lived up to the name of the establishment were enough to elevate my mood. Having been founded in the Great Depression, Friendly’s was born into the darkness and shaped by it, and just as they managed to cheer up the down and out Massholes that darkened their doorway in those early desperate days, they had done the same for me, a bucktoothed Kentucky hillbilly transplanted to the stagnant potholes of Michigan. Perhaps thanks to their roots in the depression, they’ve seemingly weathered the various storms better than their direct competitors. 

Sound medical advice.  

The similarly Massachusetts-born Howard Johnson restaurant brand barely still exists, with only one sporadically open restaurant location still using the name, but bearing little resemblance to what most would associate with the HoJo brand. Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour, a similar outfit that operated mostly on the west coast closed their last location a couple of years ago. If there’s a restaurant and ice cream parlor poised to defy death for an implausibly long time just as their founders did, it’s Friendly’s, and they’ll probably have fun doing it. After all, the feeling we call fun, at its core, is little more than a fleeting distraction from the fact that we are all going to die someday. We might as well enjoy a hearty meal, perhaps with a silly name, and some ice cream in a whimsically styled building while we wait out the inevitable. 

Broken Chains on Facebook

Broken Chains Store

We Like Roy! We Like Roy!

In discussing the history of the businesses I visit, I often find myself penning long-winded, soporific paragraphs about the mergers and acquisitions of the companies involved with the inception and decline of each restaurant and retail brand about which I see fit to write. One name seems to come up more often than others in these piles of plain prose. That name is Hardee’s.

Under the guidance of both Hardee’s Food Systems and later parent company Imasco, The Hardee’s operating territory was expanded by buying out and fully converting other fast food chains to the Hardee’s brand. Hardee’s strategy of acquiring and assimilating struggling regional chains is the reason you’re hard pressed to find anything resembling an operating Sandy’s, Burger Chef, or Dee’s Drive In today. Hardee’s assimilation strategy would come to an end in 1997 with their acquisition from Imasco by Carl’s Jr parent company CKE. Until then, every brand Hardee’s acquired was completely swallowed up, except for the one brand that Hardee’s regurgitated.

Like Hardee’s, Roy Rogers was made up of an amalgam of brands, and spent the first couple decades of its life under the Marriott corporate umbrella. The brand evolved from RoBee’s, a roast beef sandwich chain started by a group of Big Boy Franchisees in 1967, the same year Marriott acquired Big Boy. They would go on to acquire RoBee’s the following year. The name change came as the result of legal pressure from Arby’s citing similarities between the two restaurants. Big Boy founder and Marriott board member Bob Wian knew Roy Rogers personally and was able to convince the prolific western film actor to lend his name to the new, east coast-based enterprise. The first Roy Rogers opened in Falls Church, Virginia in 1968. The brand would expand its footprint along the way with the acquisition of the Baltimore-based Gino’s chain. When Roy Rogers absorbed Pappy Parker’s, in the early ‘70s their menu gained Pappy’s fried chicken and burgers making them competitive with the dominant fast food genres of the day. The chain would peak somewhere north of 600 locations thanks in part to a fiercely loyal clientele

Hardee’s, ever megalomaniacal, and seeking to expand their footprint into the Midatlantic region acquired Roy Rogers from Marriott in 1990, and converted company-owned locations to Hardee’s. Many converted locations retained fried chicken on their menus. The pre-Thickburger era Hardee’s Burgers that replaced the Roy Rogers burger line were not well received by customers, and Hardee’s failed to thrive in former Roy Rogers locations. Many of the Roy Rogers-Turned-Hardee's locations were hastily sold off to other brands in the ‘90s, leaving just 24 free standing Roy Rogers locations plus a handful of travel plaza locations in operation, all of which were owned by franchisees.

Pete Plamondon Sr. was one of those franchisees. He was previously a Marriott executive heavily involved with the Roy Rogers Brand before leaving the company and opening his own Roy Rogers in 1980. Having purchased Hardee’s and It’s legacy brands from Imasco in 1997, CKE restaurants had little interest in developing Roy Rogers, and sold the brand to Plamondon in 2002. Plamondon and later his sons Pete Jr. and Jim have been slowly expanding the brand’s presence ever since. Today, there are a total of 55 or so Roy Rogers locations in six states. I ate at the Cumberland, Maryland location a couple weeks back.

I had been on the road since 5:00 that morning, with nothing other than an orange scone from an Ohio Turnpike Panera to eat all day when I darkened the doorway of the Cumberland Roy Rogers at lunchtime. This was mostly by design. I had perused the Roy Rogers menu via their website a couple days before and marveled at the bounty of entrees and sides they had to offer. I wanted to be able to sample as much of the menu as possible, as this would be my only Roy Rogers stop. Since Roy Rogers began as a roast beef chain, I wanted to try the sandwich that started it all. I was also intrigued by the Double R Bar Burger, a cheeseburger topped with ham. There’s also a wide array of unique sides. I went with baked apples and macaroni and cheese. The uniqueness continued at the drink fountain where I was intrigued by Fanta Birch Beer on tap, the first non-fruit Fanta I’d encountered. It was lunchtime on a Sunday, and the place was packed, but the staff was more than capable of handling the crowd. The line moved quickly, and I had my order within a few minutes. 

Roast beef sandwich and Double R Bar Burger before fixin's...

Y'all git yer fixin's!

...and after

Since the early eighties, all Roy Rogers sandwiches are prepared with meat and cheese only. Patrons then dress their sandwiches with vegetables and condiments from “Roy’s Fixin's Bar.” (Burger Chef implemented a similar system around the same time, but instructed customers to order sandwiches “with or without,” either with the default toppings or plain to be dressed from the Burger Chef Works Bar.) Roy’s Fixins Bar has the typical burger toppings, plus a few unconventional selections like pico de gallo and banana peppers. The normal burger condiments are there too, plus the roast beef ones, sauces similar to, but presumably legally distinct from Arby’s Sauce and Horsey Sauce. I load my sandwiches with my preferred accoutrements, and sit down to eat. Both sandwiches seem to be high quality. Unlike Arby’s and Rax processed mystery meat, my roast beef sandwich is actually made from intact pieces of cow, sliced off an actual roast. It reminds me of the sandwiches I’d make out of leftover Sunday roasts when I was a kid. Likewise, the burger has a pleasant steaky quality, but it kind of overwhelms the ham. The sides were perfectly adequate and novel, if a bit incongruous with the sandwiches. I’ll have to order chicken and some more of the sides on my next trip. I want to experience the bulk of the menu here eventually. 

Shiny new building exterior

Thoroughly modern menu

Seasonal limited time menu item

The building appears to be a newer construction, and feels like a modern fast food joint with up to date signage and menu boards. A color palate with a blend of reds and oranges coupled with modern architecture gives the place a modern feel with nods the the brand’s late 1960s heritage. There are posters from Roy Rogers movies all over the walls, and various western themed elements to acknowledge the chain’s original spokesman. Somewhat bizarrely, there’s a lifesize cardboard cutout of longtime Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken Jr. in the lobby, plus a few posters of him scattered around the property. He’s apparently Roy Rogers spokesman these days, which is a bit confusing, but somewhat necessary considering Roy Rogers, the person, has been dead for two decades. Still, there’s a plaque with a likeness of Roy Rogers by the order counter with some corporate ad copy about great tasting food and service with a smile. Although the place is busy, the lobby is clean and is a perfectly pleasant place to be despite the crowds. I have no idea if all the surviving Roy Rogers locations are this well run, but I’m inclined to think they are considering this is my first every Roy Rogers experience. Everything about this location has left me intrigued and wanting to experience more. I may have to plan a Ponderosa-esque trek through the Tidewater to experience several meals at different Roy Rogers locations one of these days. 

Now here's Roy...

...and his buddy Cal

Being swallowed up by Hardee’s meant certain death for every other fast food brand that met that fate, but Roy Rogers was able to escape the fate of complete assimilation by the Hardee’s hivemind and come out the other side with a fast food concept that feels both novel and still thoroughly modern despite minimal changes over the years. Whether you chalk up the survival of the brand to Roy Rogers fans not accepting Hardee’s moving in on their territory, the dedication of the Plamondon family, Hardee’s spreading themselves too thin, or some combination thereof, I’m excited that Roy Rogers still exists and seems to be thriving within its regional market. In fact, it really only has broken chain status because the chain is a tenth of its former size. All other indicators show that the Roy Rogers chain is anything but broken. It would be great to see a few more of my beloved endangered fast food brands enjoy similar resurgences, and I’d be overjoyed to be telling a similar story about the comeback of my beloved G.D. Ritzy’s in a few years.

Speaking of, the new Ritzy’s in Columbus is set to open any day now, run by chain founder Graydon Webb and his sons Corey and Bryan. I’ll be making regular trips there once they’re open. If Roy Rogers is any indication, a father-sons team reviving a beloved family fast food business is a winning combination that has the potential to be a regional hit with both old and new fans. I sincerely hope that my acquaintances, the Webbs, have all the success and more with Ritzy’s that the Plamondons have had with Roy Rogers. Like Roy Rogers, G.D. Ritzy’s offers a unique, high quality experience at a reasonable price and is just as deserving of a successful revival, with or without Cal Ripken tagging along.