To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. If you buy something from an Eater link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics policy. A few months ago, on a chilly Thursday afternoon in late October, Jon LaRock rubbed his hands together and looked out over the empty parking lot in front of his restaurant. As a blanket of thick, wet snow began to settle on top of it, LaRock started pacing. Snow signals the start of the slow season in the sleepy resort town of Lake George, New York, and it had arrived earlier than usual.
None of this is a problem during the summer, when out-of-towners who pack the quirky lakeside motels to capacity spend money on anything with even the slight vestige of authentic nostalgia. As LaRock explained all of this to me, the only two customers in the restaurant got up and left. In January, news broke that the restaurant and the associated 2.
Within a few years, Johnson arrived at his signature 28 flavors and opened several extremely profitable ice cream stands along the Massachusetts shore, laying the groundwork for his first full-fledged restaurant, which opened in As the historian Paul Freedman recounts in Ten Restaurants That Changed America , Howard Johnson stumbled onto the bedrock of his future empire — a network of franchises adhering to precise specifications, tightly interwoven with the sprawling American highway system — a few years later, when he wanted to open another ice cream stand in a prime location in Orleans, Massachusetts, but had neither the capital nor the time.
So he convinced Reggie Sprague, a member of the family who owned the land, to build a restaurant there, completely designed and exclusively supplied by Johnson. That was the same year that the prevailing architecture and design of the restaurant, an outline now firmly etched into the suburban landscape and the visual memory of generations of Americans, was established. You could make money anywhere One them was a young Jon LaRock, who worked the night shift, from 5 p.
The little kids are going to want to kiss her, the mothers are going to want to hug her, and the dirty old fathers are going to want her to sit on their laps! She can handle herself. In Johnson had the desire to open a new restaurant in Orleans on a tract of land owned by Eugene Sprague. Located where Route 28 met Route 6A it was a perfect spot to catch the eye of thousands of motorists daily.
Time and money were the sticking points as Johnson did not have the time to run a second location nor the money upfront to lease the land. A franchise was born. Howard Johnson would sell the rights to use his name and logo in addition to shipping the same food products to another site. Thus the new location would essentially be a carbon copy of the original. It was a new concept for the restaurant industry.
By the end of the summer of the restaurant was serving as many as meals per day, not including ice cream. Initially opened seasonally within two years Sprague had paid off his debt.
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Most of the restaurants closed and the Company faced bankruptcy. Johnson kept the Company alive by providing food for military installations, defense plants and schools.
When the war ended, most of the restaurants reopened and new ones were built. The trend toward a scarcity of skilled chefs had already come into focus and steps to cope with this labor shortage had to be taken. Johnson pioneered the new convenience food concept of processing and pre-proporting food in Company-operated central plants and shipping to restaurants for final preparation and cooking to insure high quality standardized food service.
Each restaurant was topped with a bright orange roof so the traveler would immediately recognize the restaurant. This became a beacon to the travelers as Howard Johnson's became know for quality food at reasonable prices and with the added lure of ice cream available in 28 flavors. Howard Johnson's had restaurants in when the Company entered the lodging industry with the opening of it's first franchised motor lodge in Savannah, Georgia.
A pre-sold name in which the motorist placed confidence, soon became a combined dining and one-stop overnight convenience. In , Howard D. Johnsons passed the reins to his son, Howard B. Growth continued and the Company became publicly owned in , with it's stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
In the 's, HoJo still owned the road,expansion had stretched coast-to-coast. HoJo's was the second largest food feeder in the U.
By the late 's, HoJo's empire consisted of over 1, restaurants, more than motor lodges, vending and turnpike operations and a manufacturing and distribution system. Despite this growth, competition from fast food chains and other, new emerging chains had cut into HoJo business.
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