6 Restaurant Chains That Started in Pennsylvania and Went National
A young mother sets up a card table at the farmers market in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, in 1988, selling homemade pizza, ice cream, and a soft pretzel recipe she’s still working out.
The early pretzels come out so bad she almost drops them from the menu.
She keeps twisting the recipe instead, and within a few years, the pretzels are the only thing selling out every single day.
These are the restaurant chains that started as one small Pennsylvania stand and ended up everywhere.
1. Rita’s Italian Ice
Rita’s Italian Ice started with a Philadelphia firefighter, not a corporate boardroom.
Bob Tumolo spent his shifts fighting fires, and in the summer of 1984 he opened a walk-up window in Bensalem, a Bucks County suburb just north of Philadelphia, selling Italian ice from a family recipe.
He named the business after his wife, Rita.
Neighbors lined up.
Tumolo added frozen custard to the menu not long after, and franchising took off from there.
Rita’s now runs stores in more than 30 states, stretching well past the Northeast corner it started in.
That walk-up window in Bensalem never closed. It just kept opening in 29 more states.
2. Auntie Anne’s
Auntie Anne’s almost didn’t happen because the first batch of pretzels flopped.
Anne Beiler grew up in an Amish-Mennonite family in Lancaster County, and in 1988 she bought a stand at the farmers market in Downingtown, a Chester County town, to sell pizza, ice cream, and soft pretzels.
The early pretzels were rough.
Beiler kept reworking the recipe until the pretzels started outselling everything else on the table.
She dropped the rest of the menu and built the whole business around dough, salt, and butter.
Auntie Anne’s now runs close to 2,000 locations across the United States and more than two dozen other countries.
A farmers market stand that almost sold pizza instead became a global chain built entirely around the pretzel nobody expected to work.
3. Insomnia Cookies
Insomnia Cookies began as a way to make rent, not a business plan.
Seth Berkowitz was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 2003 when he started baking cookies in his dorm room and biking them over to classmates late at night.
Late-night cravings paid the bills.
The first storefront opened outside Pennsylvania, in Syracuse, New York, not long after, though the Philadelphia dorm-room idea kept spreading anyway.
Insomnia Cookies now runs more than 265 stores across the country, plus locations in Canada and England, and many of them stay open past midnight.
Rent money from a dorm room is now a chain that hands out cookies at 2 a.m. in three countries.
4. Bruster’s Real Ice Cream
Bruster’s Real Ice Cream grew out of a stand next to a family restaurant.
Bruce Reed developed his own ice cream recipe and opened the first Bruster’s store in Bridgewater, a Beaver County town outside Pittsburgh, in 1989.
He made each batch fresh, right there in the store.
That part never changed.
Reed started franchising in 1993, and the chain grew store by store instead of chasing one big investor.
Bruster’s now operates more than 200 stores across 24 states, plus a handful of locations in Guyana.
Reed still makes the ice cream fresh in-store, the same way he did next to that Beaver County diner in 1989. He just runs 200 stores now instead of one.
Psst! How much do you know about Pennsylvania’s food history? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Pennsylvania Food IQ
Answer these questions on Pennsylvania food history and trivia. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
In 1904, a young drugstore clerk in Latrobe, Pennsylvania invented a dessert that became a soda fountain staple across the country. What did he create?
5. Philly Pretzel Factory
Philly Pretzel Factory started with two childhood friends and one storefront in Northeast Philadelphia.
Dan DiZio and Len Lehman opened their first shop in the Mayfair section of the city in 1998, twisting soft pretzels fresh throughout the day instead of shipping them in frozen.
Customers noticed the difference.
The pair kept the brand name tied to the city most associated with soft pretzels in the country.
Philly Pretzel Factory now runs more than 160 stores across 10 states, reaching as far from home as South Carolina and Texas.
Two friends baking pretzels fresh in Mayfair built a chain that now ships the city's signature snack well past its own border.
6. Quaker Steak & Lube
Quaker Steak & Lube never pretended to be anything but a car-culture restaurant.
George Warren III and Gary Meszaros opened the first location in Sharon, a Mercer County town near the Ohio border, in 1974, right in the middle of that decade's gas crisis, and borrowed part of the name from Quaker State Oil.
A 1936 Chevrolet has sat inside since opening day.
It's still there.
Wing sauces get the same treatment, with heat climbing from Mild all the way to Atomic Scorpion, rated in actual Scoville Heat Units instead of a plain hot-or-mild label, and a Super Charged level in between that keeps the garage theme going.
The chain filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and changed hands twice in the years after.
It kept its doors open anyway, and today Quaker Steak & Lube runs 27 locations across 8 states, from Ohio to South Carolina.
The 1936 Chevrolet is still parked inside, same as it was during the gas crisis that opened the place.
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A driver from Ohio waits in traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, ready to turn left the second the light changes.
It turns green, and three cars swing left ahead of her before the cars going straight even move. Nobody behind her taps the horn.
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A Pennsylvania transplant walks into a grocery store in Nevada looking for scrapple and walks out empty-handed.
The deli clerk has never heard the word. Neither has anybody else in the store.
