Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster

It is, of course, not fashionable in 2014 to offer praise of any kind for fast food. Let’s put that on our table here as a given right away. But what a satiating trip down memory lane, admittedly as guilty pleasure, it can be to recall those more modest ghosts of hamburger joints past.

Roy Allen and Frank Wright, founders of A&W Restaurants, were very likely the first true hamburger franchisers, selling franchises in California way back in 1921. In 1956, the first A&W drive-in restaurant in Canada opened on Portage Avenue right in Winnipeg.

Where I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, while we had an A&W on Simcoe Street, long before there was a McDonald’s with its signature “Big Mac” and “Quarter Pounder,” sandwiches, there was also another great hamburger joint that was, too, part of an American fast-food chain, called Red Barn and their hamburgers of choice were, believe it or not, called the “Big Barney” and the “Barnbuster.”

The Red Barn restaurant was a fast-food restaurant chain founded in 1962 in Springfield, Ohio by Don Six, Jim Kirst and Martin Levine. Originally, the Red Barn restaurants were in the shape of barns with a glass front and limited dining room seating.

Red Barn peaked in its heyday in the early 1970s with more than 400 restaurant locations in 22 states, as well as locations in Canada, and even a dozen in and around Melbourne, Australia.

Servomation bought the company from Foodcraft Management in the late 1960s and then City Investing bought Servomation in 1979. Motel 6 bought Servomation in 1979. By 1987, Red Barn was down to 15 locations after filing for bankruptcy protection in January 1986.

Red Barn was the first major fast-food chain to have self-service salad bars and its chicken and fish were fried in pure vegetable oil.

While Red Barn was long gone from my hometown (it became a real estate office before I left in 1976), as late as 1993 I would have the pleasure of dining at a Red Barn several times a year on drives from Southern Ontario to New England and back.

The last Red Barn restaurant I ever ate at was located along a mountainous two-lane stretch of U.S. Route 7, a road that was part of the original plan for the United States highway system approved by the Bureau of Public Roads in November 1926, up in the Adirondacks in Troy, in Rensselaer County in eastern New York State, 30 miles from the Vermont state line and the Green Mountains.

As fast food goes, I guess that means Red Barn was pretty memorable.