What Happened to The Big Boy Burger? | The Burger McDonald's Copied

Video Description

You held it with both hands and it was still too big. Two patties. Three layers of bun. That red relish dripping down your wrists. You were ten years old and you were not letting go of this hamburger for anything. That was the Big Boy. In February 1937, a twenty-two-year-old named Bob Wian stood behind the counter of a ten-stool hamburger stand in Glendale, California. A musician asked for something different. Wian cut a bun in three, stacked two patties with lettuce, cheese, and his secret red relish, and invented the double-decker hamburger as a joke. A chubby six-year-old named Richard Woodruff who swept floors for free burgers inspired the name. A Warner Bros. animator sketched the mascot on a napkin. Stan Lee wrote the comic books. The Beatles ate there in 1965. By 1979 there were over a thousand Big Boy restaurants coast to coast. Then in 1967 a McDonald's franchise owner named Jim Delligatti — who had previously managed a Bob's Big Boy in California — built the exact same sandwich and called it the Big Mac. He admitted it to the Los Angeles Times: "This wasn't like discovering the light bulb. The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket." McDonald's now sells 550 million Big Macs a year. Bob Wian never received a cent of credit. Today Big Boy has shrunk to 55 locations, mostly in Michigan. The commissary in Glendale that made the original red relish closed decades ago. People have spent forty years trying to recreate that taste at home and none of them have gotten it right. The original double-decker hamburger exists only in the memory of the people who tasted it. If you remember the Big Boy, tell me which one was yours. If you can still taste that relish, tell me about it. #BeforeItVanished #BigBoy #Big #Mac #Double #Decker #burger #Nostalgia #BobsBigBoy #American #Diner