McDonald’s, the world’s largest restaurant chain may have been started in 1940 if one takes that as the year Richard and Maurice McDonald launched their first restaurant. They turned it into a franchise business in 1953, which is a good deal more like the company operates today. By some measures, particularly the number of locations, Subway, launched in 1965, is larger than McDonald’s. In either case, businesses that started out very small, have burgeoned into companies with thousands of locations both in the U.S. and abroad.
In the period after the launches of these two large chains, several others, somewhat smaller, have been created. Among these are Burger King, IHOP, and Applebee’s. The process has not stopped. Very recently, there has been a set of fast-growing “fast casual” sector (think Chipotle). Operations like Shake Shack, Jersey Mike’s, and Wingstop have been growing at lightning speed, offering high-quality food at a reasonable price and with lots of conveniences.
Chains like these are staking their claim in a super-competitive industry and are well on their way to becoming household names, but some of the true old-timers blazed trails at a time when fast food, and chain restaurants in general, were still considered a novelty. It’s no coincidence that many of the oldest chains were founded in California, the true land of opportunity, at a time when new freeways translated to lots of hungry travelers looking for a quick, inexpensive bite.
To pick America’s old restaurant chain, 24/7 Tempo examined lists of the country’s top nationwide and regional food service operations from sites including Nation’s Restaurant News, Restaurant Business, and QSR Magazine. We then filtered out those known to be relative newcomers, determining the founding dates, original locations, and number of U.S. locations for the remaining chains from their own websites whenever possible. In cases where that information was not available from the chains directly, we drew data from Statista and Scrapehero. (Note that some of these chains trace their founding date to earlier efforts under different names.)
The oldest chain Nathan’s Famous. Here are the details:
> Year founded: 1916
> Original location: Coney Island, NY
> Approximate number of units (US only): 295 (including delivery-only locations)
Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker arrived in New York in 1912, and quickly got a job serving thin German sausages called frankfurters (made handheld by tucking them into buns) at popular Coney Island restaurant Feltman’s, for 10 cents each. Encouraged to go into business on his own by singing waiters Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante (as legend has it), he built a stand a couple blocks away and started selling frankfurters of his own, based on a recipe from his wife, for five cents instead. He lured cleanliness skeptics by bringing in men wearing surgeon’s smocks to be seen eating hot dogs in front of the stand, and the crowds appeared soon after and never left. The original Nathan’s remains a must-visit Coney Island destination to this day, and a nationwide expansion was kicked off by Nathan’s son, Murray, in 1959.
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