On the Road with
Howard Johnson

It was the onslaught of McDonald’s and the American craze for fast food that eventually overwhelmed the Howard Johnson restaurant chain and condemned it to Chapter Nine – but it should be remembered that it was Howard Johnson who created the market for roadside restaurant franchises; he was the one who dug the canals that McDonald’s would flood. For roughly sixty-five years his orange-roofed structures could be seen “from Maine to Florida and as far west as Ohio [and Baldwin Park, California]”. The Ho Jo plan is familiar to us today:

“To make sure that the food in every one of his restaurants is exactly the same, the Johnson rule-books are as precise as any army manual. Whether you want fried clams in Manchester or Miami, there will always be from 19 to 21 in a portion, fried at precisely the 375 degrees. Your cup of coffee will always be filled to 3/8 of an inch from the top. An ice cream cone always has the same amount of extra cream dripping over the edge…”

Johnson’s recipe for success was simple: good food, served in attractive surroundings. Americans flocked to his restaurants in huge numbers – at one time there were as many as 1,000 in existence (today, there are two). He is largely remembered for having written the book on restaurant franchising.

– from Amazon:

Click here to read about the earliest development of airline food…