An equipment maker’s franchise idea.

Burger Chef grew out of an equipment business in Indianapolis. In a RetroIndy history published on 5 September 2017, The Indianapolis Star wrote that Robert Wildman, Frank Thomas and Donald Thomas of General Equipment Sales Inc. announced plans for a nationwide network of franchised stores to be called “Burger-Chef,” a natural fit, the newspaper said, for a company that manufactured soft ice cream freezers and meat broiling equipment. The Star dates the original restaurant to May 1957, at Little America Park at 62nd Street and Keystone Avenue. English Wikipedia, citing a 2009 Arcadia history of the chain by Scott R. Sanders, also gives 1957 for the opening and says the Thomas brothers had patented a flame broiler through their parent company, General Equipment Corporation, in 1954. Time, in a history published on 19 May 2014, wrote that the chain was born in the spring of 1958 in Indianapolis.

The name did much of the early work. Time reported that it was reportedly chosen to present the new restaurant as a more highbrow version of Burger King, and the hyphenated “Burger-Chef” of the original announcement put a cook’s title beside the product. By October 1959, the Star wrote, the business was trading as Burger Chef Systems, Inc., with franchises opening rapidly around Indianapolis and plans announced for many more. Time mentions early franchises in Des Moines and Louisiana and a training system that brought new operators to Indianapolis to learn everything from refilling ketchup dispensers to interviewing staff and keeping accounts.

The menu gave the brand its vocabulary. The Star dates the Big Shef, a double-decker hamburger with cheese, sauce and lettuce on a toasted bun, to 1965, with the Super Shef added later as another signature item; in the same year, it wrote, Burger Chef opened a downtown cafeteria at Washington and Meridian streets that offered a light breakfast. The deliberate “Shef” spelling turned the chef in the name into a family of product names, one that Hardee’s would bring back decades later.

General Foods, Burger Chef and Jeff, and Hardee’s.

In the late 1960s the chain became part of a packaged-food company. English Wikipedia dates the purchase by General Foods Corporation to 1968, citing a Wall Street Journal report of 16 October 1967 that General Foods planned to buy Burger Chef Systems; Time also gives 1968, while the Star’s RetroIndy column dates the purchase to 1967. Time noted that General Foods already owned brands such as Jell-O, and wrote that under the new owner the Burger Chef logo was redesigned. It also reported that the advertising agency McCann Erickson won the Burger Chef account in 1968 and resigned it in 1971, when Ogilvy & Mather took it on.

The advertising had a cast. The chain’s two mascots were Burger Chef, a cartoon chef, and Jeff, his young sidekick; English Wikipedia, citing the Star Tribune in 2014, says the chef was voiced by Paul Winchell. The Star recalled that the duo appeared in advertising and that live versions of the pair made special appearances at stores and community events. Slogans recorded by English Wikipedia ran from “There’s more to like at Burger Chef” in 1970–71 to “Nowhere else but Burger Chef” from 1980, and Time quoted the period line “Burger Chef goes all out to please your family.” The Star wrote that General Foods modernised the restaurants in 1974, adding do-it-yourself condiment bars and salad bars, and introduced the “Fun Meal” for children; English Wikipedia describes the Funmeal packaging as carrying stories, riddles and puzzles about Burger Chef and Jeff and their friends, among them a magician called Burgerini, a vampire called Count Fangburger and a witch called Cackleburger.

The chain ended by conversion rather than by a single closing day. English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of 10 December 1981, says General Foods sold Burger Chef in 1982 to the Canadian company Imasco, which also owned Hardee’s; the Star wrote that Hardee’s began converting company-owned restaurants into Hardee’s stores and gave franchisees the option to convert, and English Wikipedia adds that restaurants which did not convert or rebrand closed. Time reported that in 1996 the final Burger Chef franchise, in Cookeville, Tennessee, was converted into a “Pleasers” restaurant.

Design and documentation.

The chains in this group are restaurant names that closed, shrank to a handful of locations or came back under new owners. A restaurant brand lives in more places than a packaged product does: on a pole sign seen from the road, on a menu board and a printed menu, on uniforms, napkins and cups, and in the shape of the building itself, which was often designed so that a passing driver could recognise the chain before reading a word.

That is why so much of a restaurant identity outlasts the business behind it. Buildings are sold and reused with their rooflines still recognisable; signs are taken down and kept; menus, matchbooks and advertising characters survive in collections and in memory. When a name is revived, the new owner usually works from those surviving pieces, so the identity a guest meets today may be a reconstruction of an older one.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the chain, who has owned the name, when it closed or came back, and how its signs, logos, mascots and buildings have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A chef, a sidekick and a name that came back.

The Burger Chef identity was built around a character as much as a symbol. The name described a cook, the mascot was a cartoon chef, and the product names — Big Shef, Super Shef, Funburger, Funmeal — carried the same idea onto the menu board. English Wikipedia dates the Funburger, whose packaging included puzzles and a small toy, to 1972 and the Funmeal to 1973. The do-it-yourself condiment bars that the Star describes appear in English Wikipedia as the Works Bar, and the chain’s 1976–80 slogan, “We really give you the works,” picked up the same word.

The brand kept a second life through its later owners and through television. On 23 April 2007 a PR Newswire release from Hardee’s Food Systems, then a subsidiary of CKE Restaurants of Carpinteria, California, announced that the Burger Chef® Big Shef™ hamburger was returning for a limited time at Hardee’s restaurants in Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Fort Wayne, South Bend and Dayton, and described it as a signature burger on the Burger Chef menu in the 1970s and 80s. English Wikipedia records further limited returns of the Big Shef in 2001 and 2014, and says that a Chicago company petitioned in 2007 to cancel the Burger Chef trademark for abandonment and withdrew the petition in 2009. In 2014 the AMC drama Mad Men made Burger Chef a client of its fictional advertising agency, which Time used as the occasion for its history of the real chain.

For a design guide, Burger Chef shows how far a cartoon chef, a coined spelling and a family slogan can carry a fast-food brand, and how a product name can live on inside another company’s menu. Compare Jell-O, another General Foods brand with a long advertising history, and Rax Roast Beef, another fast-food chain in this series. For this guide we use flame red, mustard yellow and grill brown with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Burger Chef’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.