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I came across this restaurant on Facebook. I had no idea K-Mart had launched a small string of stand-alone restaurants.
From Remembering Retail on Facebook:
Before there were Big Kmarts, what if I told you there were Big K Burgers? One of you sent me down the rabbit hole of looking into the Kmart Chef restaurants. And I found this shot of one in Erie, PA. It's my understanding there were only ever 11 of these to open, so it wasn't a big part of Kmart's operation. And I believe they all closed by the mid 1970s.
What ones I know of to open seem to be all over the country. I've seen Lubbock, TX, Albuquerque, NM, Wichita, and 2 in Michigan's Detroit suburbs: Warren and Pontiac, which was the first.
The idea was to be somewhere between a cafeteria and McDonald's, and drive traffic outside of the Kmart itself, even if there might be food service inside. As many of you miss the subs from the deli or the restaurant in the back, this was a shortlived concept mostly scraped into the history bin, but we're bringing it back here tonight, once and for all.