8 Things California’s Fast-Food Restaurants Did Better in the ’80s and ’90s

A taco cost 59 cents at a California Taco Bell drive-thru at the end of 1990, and a couple of dollars covered lunch.

Try that at a drive-thru today.

Taco Bell, Carl’s Jr., Del Taco, In-N-Out and Wienerschnitzel all trace their very first location back to California, decades before any of them looked the way they do today.

These are the things California’s fast-food restaurants did better in the ’80s and ’90s.

1. McDLT’s Split Container

McDonald’s built the McDLT around a packaging trick no drive-thru bothers with today.

The sandwich reached menus nationwide in 1985, a year after it turned up in test markets, split down the middle inside an oversized foam container: One side held a hot beef patty and bun, the other held cold lettuce, tomato and cheese, kept apart until the moment a customer put them together.

“Keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool” was the entire slogan.

Nothing wilted.

Today’s burger wrapper can’t make that promise.

A sandwich assembled at the register sits together in the bag, and the heat off the patty steams the lettuce and tomato long before a customer unwraps it.

McDonald’s, which got its start as a barbecue stand in San Bernardino in 1940, announced the end of the foam clamshell in November 1990, after years of environmental pushback over the packaging, and the sandwich itself was gone by early 1991.

A leaner burger called the McLean Deluxe followed it onto the menu that April.

It never came with a container built to keep two temperatures apart.

2. Carl’s Jr.’s Salad Bar

Carl’s Jr. put something on the counter in Southern California in the late 1970s that a burger chain doesn’t bother with anymore.

Founder Carl Karcher bought a hot dog cart in Los Angeles in 1941, then leased a full restaurant called Carl’s Drive-In Barbecue in Anaheim in 1945.

He didn’t open the first two restaurants named Carl’s Jr., in Anaheim and Brea, until 1956.

The chain was among the first fast-food chains to try a self-serve salad bar, starting in the mid-1970s and reaching its 200-plus California restaurants by the end of the decade, and it stayed a fixture straight through the ’80s and ’90s.

One flat price bought unlimited trips, letting a customer load a plate with lettuce, tomatoes, croutons and bacon bits, go back for more, and pay the same either way.

A second plate cost nothing extra.

Today, a California burger chain selling a bagged side salad or a wrap is about as close as it gets.

None puts out a self-serve bar with unlimited trips.

Carl’s Jr. pulled the bars in the early 2000s; the last CKE Restaurants annual report to describe self-service salad bars covered the fiscal year that ended in January 2002.

No burger chain has brought one back since.

3. Wienerschnitzel’s Drive-Through-the-Building A-Frames

Wienerschnitzel cut a hole through the middle of its restaurants and let cars drive in one side and out the other.

John Galardi, who came up working for Glen Bell at Taco Tia, opened the first Der Wienerschnitzel on Pacific Coast Highway in Wilmington, in the Los Angeles harbor area, on July 3, 1961.

The bright red A-frame came a year later.

The larger version of that building was pierced by a drive-thru lane running straight through the center: A driver pulled in under the roof, ordered, took the bag and rolled out the far side without circling the lot once.

The kitchen sat on both sides of the car.

Galardi’s company stopped building the A-frame in the early 1970s in favor of a flat-roofed store with a dining room and a lane wrapped around the outside.

But the originals were still standing and still serving through the ’80s and ’90s, impossible to mistake for anything else on a Southern California corner.

The red roof was the sign.

Nothing built today does that: A modern drive-thru sends a car around the building, never through it.

The A-frames that survive have mostly been remodeled, the lane walled in for extra dining room or swapped for an ordinary side window, and plenty of the rest now house taquerias and smog shops.

The 1961 Wilmington stand is still open, and Los Angeles declared it Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1046.

4. Taco Bell’s 59-Cent Menu

Taco Bell once built an entire pricing strategy around spare change.

The chain, born in Downey, California, rolled out a 59-79-99-cent value menu in October 1990, pricing tacos, tostadas and bean burritos at 59 cents apiece.

Spare change covered a taco.

Founder Glen Bell opened his first Taco Bell in Downey in 1962, years after selling 19-cent tacos out of the side window of his San Bernardino hamburger stand.

Nothing on today’s Taco Bell menu gets anywhere close to those prices, even after accounting for how much a dollar buys compared with 1990.

5. Naugles’ All-Night Drive-Thru

Naugles served its full menu around the clock in Southern California, with no cutbacks after dark.

Dick Naugle opened the first one in Riverside in 1970, one of the first fast-food chains to run a 24-hour drive-thru, serving hard-shell tacos, hamburgers, shakes, fries and breakfast items at 3 a.m. exactly as it did at 3 p.m.

The lights stayed on.

The kitchen never scaled back after sundown.

That kind of promise is rarer today than it sounds.

McDonald’s has trimmed its own late-night menu since 2019, pulling items like the Filet-O-Fish between midnight and 5 a.m. at participating locations.

All Day Breakfast disappeared from the chain in 2020 and never came back.

Restaurateur Anwar Soliman, who by then owned both chains, folded Naugles into Del Taco in a 1988 merger, and the conversions ran for years afterward until the last true Naugles, in Carson City, Nevada, closed in 1995.

A fan-favorite chain vanished almost overnight.

A food blogger named Christian Ziebarth won the dormant Naugles trademark in 2015 after regulators ruled Del Taco had abandoned it, and he reopened the brand at a test kitchen in Fountain Valley, California.

That revival has moved around since, through storefronts in Huntington Beach, Stanton and Artesia, and it runs today as a food truck rather than the round-the-clock kitchen the original kept.

6. El Pollo Loco’s Salsa Bar

El Pollo Loco let customers build their own salsa plate for a quarter-century.

The chain, which opened its first U.S. location in Los Angeles, California, in 1980, added a self-serve salsa bar in the mid-1990s after testing it in a handful of restaurants.

Scoop as much as the cup could hold.

El Pollo Loco closed the salsa bars in March 2020 and moved the salsa to the front counter, where a staff member spoons it into a cup.

Same salsa, just not self-serve.

7. McDonald’s Ball-Pit Playgrounds

McDonald’s opened its first permanent play area at a Chula Vista, California, restaurant in the fall of 1972, after testing a prototype at that summer’s Illinois State Fair, years before the ball-pit PlayPlaces many ’80s and ’90s kids remember.

The yard, built to match the McDonaldland characters from the chain’s TV commercials, reportedly cost about $200,000 and lifted that one restaurant’s business by more than 60%.

Kids thought they’d stepped inside the commercial.

Outdoor Playlands and the indoor PlayPlaces that followed them, packed with ball pits and tunnel slides, reached about 3,000 locations by 1991, making McDonald’s the largest playground operator in the country and turning a fast-food stop into a free afternoon of entertainment.

McDonald’s threw in an entire play structure at no extra charge on top of the burgers and fries, the kind of built-in entertainment a visit doesn’t include anymore.

Parents had a break.

Kids had a ball pit to burn off energy in.

Hygiene complaints piled up in the early 2010s, after a researcher swabbed fast-food play areas and found bacteria in nearly every one she tested, and many PlayPlaces closed in the years that followed.

Restaurant operators closed many of the PlayPlaces that remained during the pandemic, citing health and staffing concerns.

The ones that survive are mostly at older suburban restaurants that escaped remodeling.

8. Pup 'N' Taco's Combo Menu

Pup 'N' Taco served three completely different cuisines from the same drive-thru window in Southern California, letting a carload of people order tacos, hot dogs and pastrami sandwiches without a single stop elsewhere.

The Pasadena chain, which opened its first officially branded location in 1965, built a menu around tacos and tostadas on one side and hot dogs (the "pup") and deli-style pastrami sandwiches on the other, plus burgers and fries for anyone who wanted neither.

One window served three.

One drive-thru covered three different cravings.

No fast-food chain now serving California pairs Mexican tacos with deli pastrami and hot dogs under one name, so a family that wanted three different cuisines needed one stop instead of three.