Groceteria.com

Does anybody know of any examples of when retailers entered the restaurant industry with stand-alone restaurants? I can name a few examples, but I want to know if there were any others.


* Holly Farms Fried Chicken - Was a chain of fried chicken restaurants, originally created as a joint venture between Holly Farms Poultry (producer of frozen chicken products) and Safeway

* Alphy's Coffee Shop - A division of the Alpha-Beta supermarket chain

* Grand Patio - Restaurant division of the Grand Union supermarket chain, originally only servicing the supermarkets and Grand Way discount dept. store locations, befor eventually opening stand alone locations

* The Golden Key, an experimental hamburger stand opened by A&P, only had one location and most likely wasnt opened for very long

* The Hut - I found a New York Times Article about Supermarkets General Corp (Pathmark's parent company) opening a restaurant under this name sometime in 1970, while researching this, I also came across the small "Minuteman" which some say was owned by SGC which I currently cannot find any concrete evidence of

* Harvest House - Had stand alone locations according to some F.W. Woolworth annual reports on the Internet Archive

* Lawson's Family Restaurant's - A division of the Lawson's convenience store chain in the U.S.

* Abra K Dabra - Was kind of like a Chuck E. Cheese but instead of an animatronic show it had a magic show instead, very short lived, was owned and operated by Kmart.
* Furr's Cafeteria, was also owned by Kmart

* Wag's - Diner chain, owned by Walgreens
* Corky's - Fast food burger chain, also owned by Walgreens
* Robin Hood - Casual restaurant, also owned by Walgreens

* Gold Bear Family Restaurant - Fast food, mainly focus on pizza, owned by Montgomery Ward from 1973-1984
* Putsch's Cafeteria, also owned by Montgomery Ward for a small period of time
* Sign Of The Beefeater - Originally "Sign Of The Beefcarver," also owned by Montgomery Ward for a small period of time

Schnucks' Station Restaurants...their early 1960 builds had snackbars, these started going in about 1970 into their larger stores and were pretty much gone by 1985 when they expanded the stores into them.

JJ Newberry had restaurants kind of like Woolworth and are described in their annual reports on Archive.org

Almost all variety stores had cafes and restaurants in them, I'm looking for stand-alone restaurants

The Schnucks one is pretty interesting tho

Apparently, the Lucky supermarket chain used to own the Sirloin Stockade chain of steakhouses, which currently still exists though under different ownership

Marsh Supermarkets opened a restaurant called Foxfires Family Restaurant, which somehow stayed open until 2001 though under different ownership for a while

There was only 1 location in Muncie, IN

Acme had the Hardee's franchise for the Delaware Valley region.

Fisher Foods (Cleveland) co-owned and franchised Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips during the 60s/70s.

KMart had a few freestanding KMart Chef burger places.

JJ Newberry and Woolworth had some restaurants that were separate from their variety stores.

I somehow completely forgot about Kmart Chef, though I was unaware of J.J. Newberry's stand alone restaurants however, which might have been what someone else was talking about when the mentioned the Newberry's brand. As of now I havent looked into it yet but according to someone else they do talk about them in some of their old annual reports.