A family café, an airliner name and a Mount Vernon front.

Frisch’s is a Cincinnati family business that became a regional face of the Big Boy. English Wikipedia traces it to Samuel Frisch, who opened the Frisch Cafe in Cincinnati in 1905, closed it five years later and opened another café in the suburb of Norwood; a new building followed in 1915 for the restaurant then known as Frisch’s Stag Lunch. From 1923 three of his sons, David, Reuben and Irving, ran the café, with David Frisch in the lead role.

David Frisch then went out on his own. Wikipedia says he sold his interest in the Stag Lunch in 1932 and opened his own Frisch’s Café; a second location opened in 1938 across from the Stag Lunch in Norwood, and both cafés closed that year. A local businessman, Fred Cornuelle, advised Frisch and backed a new restaurant. The result, in 1939, was the Mainliner, a year-round drive-in that Wikipedia places on Wooster Pike in Fairfax, Ohio, and the International Directory of Company Histories, as reproduced by FundingUniverse, places in Norwood. Wikipedia says the drive-in was named after a passenger airliner that flew into nearby Lunken Airport, so the business began with a name borrowed from the sky rather than from the family.

Architecture was part of the pitch early on. Both sources say a second Frisch’s restaurant was built in 1944, and both say it was designed to recall Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia — a colonial front for a roadside restaurant. The company history in the International Directory of Company Histories says the Mainliner’s success, with Cornuelle’s backing, paid for that second building.

The family stayed at the centre of the business for decades. Wikipedia says ownership passed from David Frisch to his son-in-law Jack C. Maier, who the company history says began working at the Mainliner in the late 1940s, and then to his grandson Craig F. Maier. In a PR Newswire release of 22 May 2015, Craig Maier said the company had been family operated “since my grandfather opened our first drive-in in 1939.” The company history adds that Frisch incorporated the business in 1947, that it went public in 1960, and that in 1966 Frisch opened a more formal restaurant near Cincinnati called Annette’s, named after his wife.

Bob Wian’s Big Boy, a territory and a string of owners.

The name on the sign changed after the Second World War. Wikipedia says that right after the war David Frisch visited one of Bob Wian’s Big Boy restaurants in California and was struck by the double-deck Big Boy hamburger; the company history in the International Directory of Company Histories says the two men met at an industry convention in California in 1946. Wikipedia says Wian wanted authorised Big Boy restaurants in other regions to protect the trademark, and offered Frisch a licence for a territory of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Florida. Frisch began selling Big Boy hamburgers at the Mainliner in 1946, and after a licensing agreement with Wian in 1947, Wikipedia says, a Frisch’s Big Boy Drive-In known as Big Boy One opened on Central Parkway north of downtown Cincinnati.

Frisch’s then licensed the name onward. Wikipedia records subfranchises to Azar’s in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Manners in the Cleveland market in 1953 and 1954, and in 1955 to the Toledo brothers Milton and David Bennett, who operated in northwest Ohio under the Frisch’s Big Boy name. A sauce became part of the brand as well: Wikipedia says the Silverton, Ohio, firm Food Specialties Co. has made Frisch’s tartar sauce since 1946 under what it describes as a handshake agreement with David Frisch, and that the sauce has been sold in local grocery stores since 1960 under the Frisch’s name.

The relationship with the national Big Boy system was settled in 2001. Wikipedia says Frisch’s sold its Florida, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas territories to Big Boy Restaurants International that year and gained perpetual rights to the Big Boy mark in Indiana, Kentucky, most of Ohio and parts of Tennessee, independent of the national chain.

Ownership then moved out of the family. Under the agreement announced on 22 May 2015, an affiliate of the private-equity fund NRD Partners I agreed to acquire all of Frisch’s shares, and the release said Craig Maier and his sister Karen Maier, vice-president of marketing, would retire and remain Frisch’s franchisees. Wikipedia dates the sale to 24 August 2015 and says Frisch’s Restaurants ceased to be a listed company on 4 September 2015. On 20 July 2020 WKRC reported that Frisch’s was permanently closing several Ohio and Kentucky locations because of the coronavirus pandemic. Wikipedia says that in late 2024 restaurants closed after eviction proceedings brought by the chain’s landlord. A group of senior managers led by Don Short and Cheryl White has owned the Frisch’s brand rights, including the right to use the Big Boy name, since 18 November 2024, Wikipedia says, and by 2025 the corporate office had moved from Cincinnati to Atlanta. Wikipedia adds that in 2025 Frisch’s entered a trademark dispute with Big Boy Restaurant Group over the use of the Big Boy name in former Frisch’s locations.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are diner, drive-in and roadside restaurant names. A restaurant brand of this kind is carried less by a single product than by a set of things seen from the road and at the counter: a sign on a pole, a canopy over parked cars, a menu board, a pie case and the colours repeated on cups, bags and uniforms.

Drive-in signage was built to be read from a moving car, so names are often short, lettering is large and colours are few. Carhop canopies, where they survive, turn a car park into part of the building, and their shape can become as recognisable as the logo itself. Inside, diners and family restaurants lean on menus, booths and display cases, and a pie case or a dessert counter can work as a piece of branding as much as a piece of furniture.

A name like this can change hands over time, passing between founders, franchisees and restaurant groups. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its signs, menus and marks have changed, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A boy of its own, repainted and redrawn.

The defining piece of the Frisch’s identity is a character it drew for itself. Wikipedia says that, as an early licensee working under an informal arrangement, David Frisch created his own Big Boy: a thinner boy with reddish or blond hair, wearing striped rather than checkered overalls, shown running or skipping. Known as the East Coast Big Boy, this figure represented Frisch’s and its licensees Manners and Azar’s through 1969. Wikipedia says the running statues still stand outside many Frisch’s restaurants, usually repainted with brown hair and checkered overalls, so the figure at the door has been redrawn in paint rather than replaced.

The company history in the International Directory of Company Histories describes the wider Big Boy image that customers came to recognise at restaurant entrances as a chubby figure with jet-black hair and checkered overalls, and Frisch’s sat inside that larger visual system while keeping its own variations.

The statue was redrawn again in March 2017. Wikipedia, citing the Cincinnati Enquirer and Franchise Times, says Frisch’s unveiled a redesigned figure resembling the original West Coast Big Boy, with a pompadour, striped overalls and modern footwear. One of the new statues, dressed in a Cincinnati Reds uniform, was placed at Great American Ball Park, and a second was installed at the Dry Ridge, Kentucky, restaurant.

Other pieces of the identity came from buildings and product names. The Mainliner took its name from an airliner, the 1944 restaurant borrowed the colonial front of Mount Vernon, and Wikipedia says that during the pandemic Frisch’s added Big Boy’s Market sections selling grocery essentials in its restaurants. The tartar sauce sold in grocery stores carries the Frisch’s name while, Wikipedia says, the recipe belongs to Food Specialties Co.

For a design guide, Frisch’s Big Boy shows how a licensed character can be redrawn by a regional operator — given different hair, overalls and pose — and then repainted and redesigned over decades while the name on the sign stays the same. Compare it with Friendly’s, another family restaurant chain that grew from a single 1930s shop, and A&W Restaurants, another American drive-in name. For this guide we use drive-in red, mustard and overall navy with a script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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