Three names in ten years.

Rax Roast Beef went through three names before it settled. Tasting Table reported in July 2025 that Jack Roschman opened the restaurant, then called JAX Roast Beef, in Springfield, Ohio, in 1967. He sold the chain to General Foods in 1969, and the name was changed to RIX Roast Beef. General Foods closed most of the restaurants in 1972, Tasting Table says, except for franchised units owned by the Restaurant Administration Corporation, headed by J. Patrick Ross.

Ross’s company had its own history. The Ironton Tribune reported in February 2008 that it started in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1962, when Ross set up Restaurant Administration Corporation with a single Burger Chef restaurant, and that it grew by franchising before it began serving roast beef sandwiches through JAX. English Wikipedia says Ross was a franchisee of several chains, including Wendy’s, Ponderosa and Long John Silver’s, and that his company bought the rest of RIX from General Foods and brought back the JAX name.

The final name came with franchising. English Wikipedia says the JAX restaurants were renamed Rax in 1977 to make the name easier to register as a trademark and to franchise, with a Rax-branded franchise restaurant opening in Columbus, Ohio; the Ironton Tribune dates the change to 1978, with a Rax store opening in Columbus. Wikipedia says Restaurant Administration Corporation became Rax Systems Inc. and then, in 1982, Rax Restaurants Inc.

The menu widened in the same period. English Wikipedia says baked potatoes and salad bars arrived in 1981, and that in 1988 the company cut back its salad and food bars to concentrate again on sandwiches.

Solaria, a cartoon spokesman and two bankruptcies.

In the late 1980s Rax tried to move its restaurants upmarket. English Wikipedia says the chain began to change its buildings from standard fast-food architecture into designs with wood elements and solaria, with the stated aim of becoming the “champagne of fast food,” while the menu shifted through pizza, pasta, Asian-themed dishes, a taco bar and a dessert bar at various times. Tasting Table describes the same period as one of an ever-changing menu and marketing that alternated between working-class customers and those who wanted a more elevated fast-food experience.

A new advertising character arrived in 1992. English Wikipedia says that in August 1992 a campaign was created with the agency Deutsch Inc. around an animated character named Mr. Delicious: a bespectacled, middle-aged man in a sport coat, carrying a briefcase. Tasting Table describes him as a cartoon man who made wry, sad comments about his personal life while talking up the virtues of eating at Rax, and says customers did not respond well to him. Rax Restaurants Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 1992, Tasting Table reports.

New owners followed. In 1994 Rax merged with Franchise Enterprises Inc. of North Carolina to form Heartland Food Systems, a Hardee’s franchisee that planned to convert Rax restaurants to Hardee’s, English Wikipedia and the Ironton Tribune say. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again in 1996, Wikipedia records, and changed its name back to Rax Restaurants Inc. Wikipedia says it then planned a revival with a simpler menu, a new store prototype and a new logo and colour scheme, before Wendy’s International offered to buy a group of Rax restaurants to convert into Tim Hortons, as the Ironton Tribune also reports. Wikipedia says the Rax brand was bought by Cassady & Associates in July 1997, was owned by Carpediem Management Co. by December 2005, and that around then Rax created a kids’ meal mascot, Uncle Alligator, shown skateboarding and playing sports on meals and toys.

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 franchisee who bought the name.

The name has belonged to a former employee since 2007. The Ironton Tribune reported in February 2008 that Rich Donohue, who started at the Ironton, Ohio, Rax as a sandwich maker in 1982 and later bought that restaurant, had formed a company called From Rax to Rich’s and bought the Rax trademark from Ohio Valley Fresh Foods. Donohue told the paper that licence costs had made new stores expensive, so buying the trademark made economic sense. Restaurants with a lifetime licence keep the Rax name as long as they stay open, he said, while new ones negotiate with his company and join a cooperative that buys food and supplies together. The company’s name, the paper noted, was a deliberate pun.

The Circleville Herald reported in April 2011 that From Rax To Rich’s Inc. had owned the trademark since 2007 and was converting a former Wendy’s building in Circleville, Ohio, into a Rax, with subcontractors preparing the outside facade for new signage. Donohue told the paper that longtime customers might notice cosmetic differences in today’s restaurants, and that the salad bars had left the menu years earlier. In July 2025 Tasting Table, citing the official Rax website, listed the remaining restaurants in Joliet, Illinois; Harlan, Kentucky; and Circleville, Lancaster, Ironton and New Carlisle, Ohio.

Rax’s advertising lines show how often its message moved. English Wikipedia lists slogans including “I’d Rather Rax, Wouldn’t You?”, “Fast Food with Style,” “All the Right Stuff” and “Gotta get back to Rax.” Between the JAX and RIX signs, the solaria of the late 1980s, Mr. Delicious and Uncle Alligator, the chain changed its look and voice many times, while the short name stayed the same.

For a design guide, Rax shows how a short, ownable name can outlast a string of owners, menus, buildings and mascots and stay on a sign because individual franchisees keep it there; compare Arby’s, another roast beef sandwich chain, and Burger Chef, the chain Rax’s later parent company started out franchising. For this guide we use roast brown, mustard and bun cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Rax Roast Beef’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.