The Dogs of War: I'm not sure if this one is around, but what about Big Boy?

They're alive and kicking. 124 locations in the US.

http://www.bigboy.com/locator/

copycatzero: titwrench: Lafiel: Boll weevil in Encinitas.
Best burgers ever.

Just Encinitas? They are still around San Diego.

That's good to hear. I was disappointed when I saw Boll Weevil on the Wikipedia list, since it was one of our favorite restaurants when we used to live in San Diego.

There is one in Ramona, CA.

thorsmistress: Quincy

fark yeah.

Sort of on the same page, since I was too young to know if most food was really good.... but I know damn well their yeast rolls rocked! I am not sure if they still exist anywhere or not... google results are inconclusive.

Vodka Zombie: Arthur Treacher's.

They had great fish and chips but I quit going there when they had a special on 'baby lobster tails' and they were serving farkin' crawfish tails. NOT THE SAME YOU DAMN LIMEY!

Donnchadha
RIP Boobs Rodriguez

Er....Chi Chi is still going at it just on the other side of the Courtney Campbell Causeway from Tampa. His programs for teens in trouble is one of the best in the country.

Lorelle: That was another place that made us brown people laugh...it's Spanish slang for "boobs." :)

Yo quiero ver a los pechos. yo quiero ver a los mucho pechos. Una gran cantidad de pechos desnudos.

What, no love for Walgreen's restaurants and soda fountains? Ditto for Woolworth's.

squeezers

build your own burgers... like a salad bar but they start you off with a warm bun and a nice big patty... so awesome... and they had an arcade inside

course I was a kid at the time so it could be dogshart for all I know now

Happy Hours: markie_farkie: My vote would be for the old-school original Shakey's pizza place. Not the crappy buffet version, but the original, with long plank tables, and Three Stooges playing on a projector screen.

The one I remember going to as a kid is now a strip club and has been for years.

rockford, il?

Bathia_Mapes: Buffet: Sizzler.

Sizzler is still around.

In fact, there's one in my area, plus a number of them in different parts of Oregon.

REALLY? How cool is that? They closed 'em all around here years ago. I have no Farking idea why!
(I also have no idea why this Farking thing loads so slowly!!)

WhyteRaven74: This was just a Chicago suburbs thing, but Cock Robin Ice Cream. There was nothing quite like cube shaped scoops of ice cream.

Or the Blizzards and One in a Millions. And for an ice cream place, they had surprisingly tasty burgers. A couple times I went for Gene and Jude's, got to the parking lot and went in to Cock Robin for burgers and a shake instead.

I can't believe I read the whole thread.


/so far

Having grown up in Texas and Louisiana, I think the only restaurant on that list that I recognized was Steak n Ale. I haven't seen a Black eye'd Pea in years, are there any of those left?

Got my list pared down to:

Dog & Suds
Manner's Big Boy
Burger Chef
Beef & Burgandy - regional. Above average prime rib that was cheap, and all the steamed shrimp & chicken wings your gut can hold while you wait. Used to knock out 2 plates of shrimp & wings, and a 14oz Prime Rib for $20.

/left off Cletus Wimley's Choke & Puke

Lorelle: The Farrell's in Downey was my high school's main Friday night post-football game hangout way back when. Good times, good times.

I worked at that one in 1981. My first day was a Saturday afternoon complete with a party of some 100+ kids. Insanity.

Might as well throw this in here...

Anybody remembers Helms Bakery Link

Bathia_Mapes: From what I remember, at least some of them got closed in the mid-90s, after the Jack In the Box e-coli outbreak. Some people got sick from e-coli at Sizzler restaurants too because of poor food handling practices. Amongst other things hey were using the same cutting boards used for raw meat to cut up fruit & vegetables for the salad bar and ended up cross contaminating. The kitchen employees were just rinsing off the cutting boards before using them to prepare the salad bar items. At the very least the cutting boards should have been put through the dishwasher, but the preferable practice is to have separate cutting boards for raw meat and raw fruits & vegetables.

The 1993 Jack-in-the-Box e. coli problem was the result of fecal matter contaminating the beef and too low cooking temperatures. Four deaths and one 'living death' Link

The 2000 Sizzler's e. coli outbreak was caused when employees cross-contaminated fresh watermelon with raw meat products. One death. This case alone is probably the best reason to leave little kids at home.

The MarlerClark website is a great resource about food and e. coli Link

elffster: Pre-Chew Charlies?

I miss that place..

Absolutely can't believe you're the only one to bring that up. Disappointed.

Hand Banana: [jsfburgerchef.homestead.com image 640x395]


came for Burger Chef, would like to leave satisfied. loved that place.

the only ones I recognize on that list are Casa Bonita, Kenny Rogers, and Showbiz Pizza. The only one I've seen in real life is Showbiz. I think it was like a Chuck E Cheese's.

I'd except Pizzeria Uno's Chicago Grill to be on that list before long, unless their foreign locations keep them afloat. I used to go to the ones in Lawrence, KS and the KC area and they were always fantastic, but since about 2005 there isn't one within 500 miles anymore. I tried a couple in St. Louis and just recently one in Wisconsin and they were all shiat. The company has already gone bankrupt once and closed down a ton of locations.

I would love for them to get back to the level they were at a decade ago, when the food was good. Dunno what happened.

YouPeopleAreCrazy: DjangoStonereaver: Carroll's.

Carrols as a corporation is not quite defunct. An offshoot of Tastee Freze, they eventually morphed into Burger King, and is now the largest franchisee of BK.

/Carrols was my 1st real job, way back when
s
Not to mention they're still around in Finland. Funny how some chains get exported to the weirdest places.

thoreau: the only ones I recognize on that list are Casa Bonita, Kenny Rogers, and Showbiz Pizza. The only one I've seen in real life is Showbiz. I think it was like a Chuck E Cheese's.

I'd except Pizzeria Uno's Chicago Grill to be on that list before long, unless their foreign locations keep them afloat. I used to go to the ones in Lawrence, KS and the KC area and they were always fantastic, but since about 2005 there isn't one within 500 miles anymore. I tried a couple in St. Louis and just recently one in Wisconsin and they were all shiat. The company has already gone bankrupt once and closed down a ton of locations.

I would love for them to get back to the level they were at a decade ago, when the food was good. Dunno what happened.

The one time I tried it, the pizza took 40 minutes to get (to be fair, the waiter did warn before hand), but when it got in, it was barely warm and I was pretty sure it was just a frozen pizza they had chucked in the oven.

Arby's.

Yes, I know it's not technically defunct. But what they call Arby's today has nothing in common with the Arby's of the late 80s (maybe earlier than that, but that's when I first started eating there) and most of the 90s.

Their chicken sandwich (with real strips of chicken, not the farking deli meat their serve now) was one of the best fast food sandwiches I've ever had.

A bakery company bought the rights to the Bill Knapp's Celebration Cake. I find them in Krogers and other grocery stores sometimes... Celebration Cake

Mammoth Orange along the 99 in CA.
Lyon's
The Frost Shop in Wawona
The Bigfoot Cafe on 41 in Oakhurst (had the best chocolate shakes evar, if I were a sasquatch, I would have risked going there for the shakes)
Poor Richards in the Los Angeles area (Inglewood/Hawthorne area?). As a kid, I thought the huge train sets that surrounded the interior were so awesome.

Good times.

PacManDreaming: And if you grew up in the DFW area during the '70s and '80s, this was the place to go for pizza and subs. And video games. There should be a law that states that if you sell pizza, you have to have classic video games in the restaurant.

[i.imgur.com image 537x360]

Crystals is still open. It is really run down and nasty now.

FWIW, my first job was as a server at Ponderosa. It's been closed for a long time(Flint, Fenton/Hill), but there is still one open in West Branch, MI that I visited within the last year.

Kenny Rogers Roasters .

Tony_Pepperoni: Kenny Rogers Roasters

I also miss that place, but it was not a chain and could never work as one.

/Do I know you?

Isaly's (Isaly Shoppe) - Inventors of the Klondike bar - Ohio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaly%27s

bmr68: Beefsteak Charlie's this was the best place to go underage drinking.



THIS. Sometimes we used to go "viking style," meaning no utensils allowed, and using those mini-pitchers of all-you-can-drink beer as mugs. Good times.

buckeyebrain: libranoelrose: Fuddruckers

Fuddruckers is still around, just very scattered.

They're all over here.PacManDreaming: clevernamehere: I liked their robot band better than the Chuck E Cheese thing

When Chuck E. Cheese first came to my hometown, you didn't go there for the bland pizza or idiotic animatronics, you went there because they had more video games than anyone else around, including the major arcades at the malls. I don't know how many tokens my nine-year-old hands pumped into Vanguard, Tempest, Red Baron, Pooyan, Space Fury, Berzerk and Defender/Stargate. Man, that place was great.

Then Showbiz came and ran everything into the ground. Showbiz and Chuck E. Cheese soon became places you took small children and the most exciting game they had was ski-ball.

Funny. In my town Showbiz was there first and CEC came later. Showbiz always had lots of video games. Mario Bros. VS; TMNT; and Simpsons were the ones I remember, as a little kid. No change when CEC came but the band and the decorations.

Burger Chef

mediaseth: Tony_Pepperoni: Kenny Rogers Roasters

I also miss that place, but it was not a chain and could never work as one.

/Do I know you?

Roasters wasn't a chain? Well, now, that's news to me, unless we all live in Albuquerque, NM, which we don't.

We had one here, if you had one there, there were two. That's a chain if we assume there might have been one more.

My vote is for Woolworths' The Harvest House.

Bathia_Mapes: Znuh: Benjamin Orr: Bathia_Mapes: WorthNoting: Woolworth's Cafeteria

*sigh*

So much this.

Woolworth's & Newberry's were side by side in downtown Eugene. Used to love getting a club sandwich & chocolate milkshake at Woolworth's. I'm thankful they were still there for part of my son's childhood. While I favored Woolworth's, he preferred Newberry's & their tulip sundaes.

Face it sweetie, we're old farts. :-)

A long time ago I was banished from Woolworth's. Not sure if it was just that branch or all of them.

This. The Woolworth's, not the banishment. I was insanely little, like 5 or 6 when my Mom would bring me into the Woolworth's in Ossining, and I'd get a nice tasty red hotdog and a shake.

Also, anyone else remember the dining room / Cafeteria in Sears? The one I used to go to (again with Mom) was in White Plains, NY. Dark, dimly lit, and had this crazy ambiance. Fish and Chips there were to die for.

/Sigh
//Why do all the cool places have to disappear....

Our Sears didn't have a cafeteria, but they did have an area of the store where they sold candy & cookies by the pound.

However, another department store nearby, Grants (aka W.T. Grants), had a cafeteria. Their iced tea was very popular.

Good times.... the Sears in my old downtown in the back had a large U shaped counter and did a full service lunch and supper menu. They had *great* burger and fries (and onion rings). They also served pretty good malted milkshakes.

There was also a Flying Tomato Bros in Bloomington IN. By the slice, wonderful sauce.

Worked at a G D Ritzys,

http://www.herald-dispatch.com/entertainment/dining/x493388156/G-D-Ri t zys-a-throwback-to-yesteryear

They made there own ice-cream, put spaghetti noodles in the chili, great fresh burgers. Had this PBJ - Texas Toast, whole peanuts on top of the {B, sliced strawberries on the jelly, sliced bananas as an option.

Wichita, KS might be a haven for lots of these chains. We have a thriving Taco Tico scene, a Big Cheese Pizza, a Godfathers Pizza, and a chain called NuWay (other parts of the world might know the sandwich as a Maid Rite). South of town in Wellington is an old-style A&W drive in

So I guess what I'm saying is, people in Wichita must hate good food.

\I'm from here so I can say it.

After reading about that farrells crash in Sacramento. Im done for the day. That happened 4 days before my first birthday and I just bawled my eyes out about it.

/hate to hear about kids dying.
// especially that one kid that lost 9 family members in one shot.
/// Hope he is ok.

El Torritos... My wife and use to like there. There are so few Mexican restaurants in MA