White Castle (restaurant)
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White Castle Building No. 8, originally built in 1936 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and later remodeled. The castle-like features mimic Chicago's Water Tower Pumping Station. This building no longer houses a restaurant.
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| Founded | September 13, 1921 Wichita, Kansas, U.S. |
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| Headquarters | Columbus, Ohio, U.S. |
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Areas served
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Key people
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Lisa Ingram (CEO) |
| Website | www |
White Castle is an American regional hamburger restaurant chain in the Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic United States, generally credited as the country's first fast-food chain. It is known for its small, square hamburgers. Sometimes referred to as "sliders", the burgers were priced at five cents until the 1940s and remained at ten cents for years thereafter. For several years, when the original burgers sold for five cents, White Castle periodically ran promotional ads in local newspapers which contained coupons offering five burgers for ten cents, takeout only.
On January 14, 2014, Time labelled the White Castle slider the most influential burger of all time.
Walt A. Anderson (1880-1963) had been running food stands in Wichita since 1916 when he opened his first diner in a converted streetcar. After a second and third location, he was looking to open a fourth location when he met Billy Ingram and together they started the White Castle chain. White Castle was founded in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas. Cook Walt A. Anderson partnered with insurance and real estate man Edgar Waldo "Billy" A. Ingram to make White Castle into a chain of restaurants and market the brand and its distinctive product. The original location was the NW corner of First and Main. (The building no longer stands.) At the time, Americans were hesitant to eat ground beef after Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle had publicized the poor sanitation practices of the meat packing industry. The founders set out to change the public's perception of the cleanliness of the industry they were creating. To invoke a feeling of cleanliness, their restaurants were small buildings with white porcelain enamel on steel exteriors, stainless steel interiors, and employees outfitted with spotless uniforms. Their first restaurants in Wichita, Kansas, were a success, and the company branched out into other Midwestern markets, starting in 1922 with El Dorado, Kansas. White Castle Building No. 8, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, originally built in 1936 and remodeled (photo, right), was an example of the chain's prefabricated porcelain buildings. The building measured 28 feet (8.5 m) by 28 feet (8.5 m) and was made to resemble the Chicago Water Tower, with octagonal buttresses, crenelated towers, and a parapet wall.
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Wikipedia