Two brothers-in-law, a potato chip shop, a Scottish-themed inn and a prime rib house.

Lawry’s is an American brand of seasoned salt, spice blends, seasoning mixes and marinades, owned today by McCormick & Company. It began as a restaurant seasoning, and its name belongs to a real person: Lawrence L. “Lawry” Frank, the Los Angeles restaurateur who created it. The brand and the restaurants that share its name were once run by the same family. The seasoning business was later sold, and the two have followed separate paths since.

The family history runs through food from the start. Lawry’s Restaurants, the company that runs the restaurants, says on its history page that in 1915 Lawrence Frank opened a potato chip shop in downtown Los Angeles with his brother-in-law Theodore Van de Kamp, and that a potato shortage in 1918 led the shop to add “Dutch Girl” cookies, the start of Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakers. In 1922, the company says, Frank and another brother-in-law, Walter Van de Kamp, opened a roadhouse that became the Tam O’Shanter. Discover Los Angeles, the city’s official visitor guide, describes the Tam O’Shanter Inn as a Scottish-themed restaurant in Atwater Village opened by the pair in 1922.

The prime rib house followed in 1938. Discover Los Angeles, in an article by Elina Shatkin updated in December 2025, says the brothers-in-law opened Lawry’s The Prime Rib in Beverly Hills that year, serving a single entree, roast prime rib, wheeled to the table on a stainless-steel cart and carved to order. The article says the carts were designed by Lawrence Frank himself. Lawry’s Restaurants says the single-entree menu was based on the standing rib roast Sunday dinner of Frank’s boyhood.

The seasoning was part of that kitchen. Lawry’s Restaurants says that in 1938, after three months of experimenting each night in his home kitchen, Lawrence Frank developed a blend of herbs and spices to go with prime rib, and that this was the birth of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. Discover Los Angeles places the blend a little earlier. It says the seasoning was originally named Seazn-all, was developed by Frank at the Tam O’Shanter and was at first served only to that restaurant’s customers, and that the Los Angeles grocery chain Ralphs began carrying the blend in 1938. English Wikipedia also dates the start of retail sales to 1938, the year the Beverly Hills restaurant opened.

A family foods company, a sale in 1979, Unilever and then McCormick.

The retail seasoning grew into a company of its own, Lawry’s Foods. Lawry’s Restaurants says that Richard N. Frank, Lawrence Frank’s son, joined the family business in 1947, became president and chief executive of Lawry’s Foods in 1956, and built it into an international brand before the company was sold in 1979. The same history says that in 1971 the company opened the Lawry’s California Center near downtown Los Angeles, a garden site with shops and outdoor restaurants alongside the company’s corporate offices and production facilities.

The 1979 sale took the seasoning out of family hands. English Wikipedia says the Lawry’s product lines were sold that year to Lipton, part of Unilever. By the mid-2000s the business was listed as Unilever’s own: in a release dated 30 July 2008, Unilever described its “Lawry’s and Adolph’s branded seasoning blends and marinades business” and announced that it expected to complete the sale of that business to McCormick & Company on or about 31 July 2008.

The same Unilever release gives the timetable. It says the sale had first been announced on 14 November 2007, and that the closing followed the granting to McCormick of approval by the Federal Trade Commission to proceed with the purchase. McCormick & Company, the Maryland spice house founded in Baltimore in 1889, has owned Lawry’s since 2008, and the archived product pages on its website present the seasonings under the Lawry’s name.

McCormick’s own product page, archived in November 2024, describes Lawry’s Seasoned Salt as a blend of salt, herbs and spices, including paprika and turmeric, with onion and garlic, and lists it beside garlic salt, spice blends, seasoning mixes and marinades in the Lawry’s range. The core product, in other words, is still the restaurant seasoning, now one of a family of flavours that carry the same name.

The restaurants stayed with the families. A 2008 archived copy of the Lawry’s The Prime Rib website carried the notice that the trademarks “L” and “Lawry’s” were licensed from Lawry’s Foods, Inc., the seasoning company, to Lawry’s Restaurants Inc. Lawry’s Restaurants says on its present history page that the third and fourth generations of the Frank and Van de Kamp families continue the restaurant business, and Discover Los Angeles names Lawrence Frank’s grandson Richard R. Frank as its president and chief executive.

Design and documentation.

Spice jars, seasoning shakers and boxed potato pouches share a problem: the product inside is a dry powder, a blend or a flake that looks much the same from one maker to the next, so much of what a shopper sees on the shelf has to be carried by the container and its label. A cap colour, the shape of a tin, a band of type across a carton or a pouch that stands upright can do more work than any description of the contents.

Many of these packs are long-lived. A jar or carton may keep its basic form for decades while the company behind the name changes owners, moves its plants or widens its range far beyond the product it began with. That makes the plain questions worth asking of each name: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spices, blends or potatoes are actually grown, milled and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Seazn-all, a looping L by Saul Bass, a silver cart and an annual dinner for Rose Bowl teams.

The brand’s main design asset is a single letter. Discover Los Angeles says that the seasoned salt went on to inspire many seasonings, marinades and breading mixes, that each of them carries a “fanciful ‘L’” logo, and that the logo was created in 1959 by Saul Bass, the designer of film titles for Vertigo and West Side Story. Lawry’s Restaurants gives the same year and calls the mark the “Fanciful L”. That letter is what the 2008 restaurant website listed as a trademark licensed from Lawry’s Foods, so the same L has served both the grocery shelf and the dining room.

The name on the label came later than the seasoning. Discover Los Angeles says the blend was first called Seazn-all and served only at the Tam O’Shanter. By the time it reached Ralphs in 1938 it was linked to the prime rib house, and the founder’s nickname, Lawry, gave the seasoning, the restaurant and the foods company one name.

The restaurant built a visual world of its own around the meat. Discover Los Angeles says the original carving carts were stainless steel, designed by Lawrence Frank and heated by pans of charcoal in the lower section, and that a fully loaded cart was so heavy that asphalt tile was laid in the first restaurant so the floor would hold it. The article says the servers were women dressed in brown dresses with white pinafores, modelled on the uniforms of the waitresses at the Harvey House railway restaurants, and that carvers train for months to join a group called the Royal Order of Carvers, wearing a medallion to show their status.

Events carried the name too. Discover Los Angeles says the Lawry’s Beef Bowl, a dinner for the players and coaches of the two teams bound for the Rose Bowl Game, dates back to 1956, with each team invited on a different night. English Wikipedia says the event began before the 1957 game, when Oregon State and Iowa were entertained, and that by 1963 the dinners were known as the Beef Bowl. The article in Discover Los Angeles also says the Beverly Hills restaurant stands on its original site in a newer building, having spent the years between 1947 and 1993 across the street.

For a design guide, Lawry’s shows how a restaurant seasoning can carry a founder’s nickname and one drawn letter from a dining room onto a supermarket shelf, and keep both after the restaurants and the foods company went separate ways. Compare it with McCormick, its owner since 2008, and Morton Salt, another American salt sold under a single strong mark. For this guide we use paprika red, turmeric gold, salt cream and herb green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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