A gas station, a hamburger stand and a slogan about seeing the grill.

Steak ’n Shake began in Normal, Illinois, in 1934. English Wikipedia dates the opening to February 1934 and credits A. H. “Gus” Belt, who converted a combination gas station and chicken restaurant he owned, known as Shell’s Chicken, into a hamburger stand. Illinois Public Media, reporting in June 2019 for the chain’s 85th year, says Gus and Edith Belt opened the first location at Main Street and Virginia Avenue in Normal, and the International Directory of Company Histories (2001) opens its own list of key dates with the same year and town.

The name describes the menu. Wikipedia says the “steak” in Steak ’n Shake comes from the Steakburger, and the company’s long-running slogan, “Famous for Steakburgers,” points at the same item. The other half of the name is the milkshake, which Wikipedia describes as hand-dipped.

The early slogan of the chain was “In Sight, It Must Be Right.” Speaking to Illinois Public Media in 2019, a curator at the McLean County Museum of History described it as an early company slogan built on visibility: the grill cooks worked in the open behind glass windows and the meat was ground on site, so customers could watch their food being made. Wikipedia adds that Belt wheeled a barrel of T-bone, sirloin and round steaks into the public area of the restaurant and ground them in front of customers, and that later patrons were told the Steakburgers were still made from those cuts at the company’s own commissary, with the open grill line kept “in sight.”

Belt grew the business across central Illinois. Wikipedia says he bought a chain of Goal Post restaurants, converted them to Steak ’n Shakes and added curb service, the car-side ordering that shaped the drive-in buildings of the following decades. The original building in Normal was damaged by fire in the early 1960s, repaired and given a larger dining room, and was sold to the Monical’s Pizza company in the late 1990s, Wikipedia says.

The Belt family, Longchamps, Franklin, Kelley and Biglari.

The International Directory of Company Histories traces the ownership in short steps. It records the move into St. Louis in 1948 and Gus Belt’s death in 1954, after which the chain passed to his wife, Edith Belt. In 1969 she sold it to Longchamps, Inc., an East Coast steakhouse company, and in 1971 Longchamps sold its interest to the Franklin Corporation of Indianapolis. Wikipedia says Franklin moved the headquarters from Normal to Indianapolis, where the company is still based. Illinois Public Media summarised the first chapter in one line in 2019: the family sold the company in 1969.

In 1981, Wikipedia says, Steak ’n Shake and Franklin were acquired by E. W. Kelley and Associates, led by its chairman, E. W. “Ed” Kelley; the company directory records that the new owner formed Consolidated Products.

The current era began in August 2008, when, Wikipedia says, the investor Sardar Biglari took control of the company after several years of falling sales. Illinois Public Media described Biglari Holdings as the chain’s new owner by 2008. Today Steak ’n Shake Operations, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Biglari Holdings, headquartered in Indianapolis, and Biglari Holdings has owned the chain since that period. Wikipedia says Biglari cut the menu down to a bi-fold focused on burgers, fries and milkshakes.

The restaurant format has changed under the same owner. In 2018, Wikipedia says, the company moved to a franchise partner model, offering single operators the chance to run existing restaurants; Illinois Public Media reported on the Franchise Partner Program in 2019. In 2021 the chain moved away from casual dining toward counter ordering, replacing lunch counters with self-serve kiosks and leaning on the drive-through.

The brand has also travelled. Wikipedia says the company opened an office in Monte Carlo in December 2013, opened its first European restaurants in Cannes in May 2014 and on Ibiza the following month, and opened in Monaco in August 2020. At home, it began sponsoring the Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever basketball teams in 2010 and in 2015 put its name on the IndyCar driven by Graham Rahal of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. In May 2025, Wikipedia says, citing Forbes, the chain began accepting Bitcoin at its U.S. restaurants.

Design and documentation.

A quick-service brand is met first from the road. Before anyone reads a menu, the identity has to work on a pole sign seen from a moving car, on a roofline or a painted wall, and on the lane markings that steer a driver towards the order point. Building colours, awnings and lit lettering do much of that work, and a chain’s buildings are often designed so that one looks like the next.

The drive-thru adds its own set of surfaces: the preview board, the menu board beside the speaker post, the canopy over the window and the directional signs in between. Each has to be read quickly, often at night and in poor weather, which tends to favour short words, heavy lettering and strong contrast between type and background.

Inside the bag the identity carries on in smaller pieces — wrappers, boxes, cups, napkins and bags — printed in a limited set of colours and repeated across many outlets. Uniforms, trays and receipts follow the same palette.

Each guide that follows looks at who founded the brand, who owns it now and how its name, mark and buildings are recorded, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that is a menu, and a slogan that is a window.

The Steak ’n Shake identity is built from plain description. The name lists the two things the restaurant sold, joined by an abbreviated “and”, and the slogan that sits beside it, “Famous for Steakburgers,” restates the first half. The older line, “In Sight, It Must Be Right,” did a different job: it described the building rather than the food, promising that the grill was visible from the counter and the car park.

Architecture carries part of that story. Wikipedia says the Route 66 Steak ’n Shake in Springfield, Missouri, built in 1962, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012, citing the National Park Service’s weekly list and the Missouri nomination.

The service model has changed around the name. Wikipedia says the 2021 shift replaced lunch counters with self-serve kiosks, and that the company has moved away from full-service restaurants toward a drive-through model. Outside the United States, it lists restaurants opened from 2014 in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, and in 2016 in Chester, England.

Wikipedia and the company directory between them record each change of owner: the Belt family until 1969, Longchamps until 1971, Franklin Corporation, E. W. Kelley and Associates from 1981, and Biglari Holdings since 2008. The headquarters move to Indianapolis came under Franklin, and the company has stayed there since.

For a design guide, Steak ’n Shake shows how a slogan about an open kitchen can become a brand idea in its own right, connecting a 1930s grill counter in Normal to a listed 1960s drive-in on Route 66. Compare it with White Castle, whose white buildings sold cleanliness in the same decades, and Sonic Drive-In, another chain built around car-side service. For this guide we use shake red, grill black and counter white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Steak ’n Shake’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.