Wendy's SuperBar

The legendary Wendy's Buffet

Wendy’s wasn’t common in my area of New Jersey when I was a kid. We knew about it from commercials, but they didn’t start appearing everywhere until I was a teenager. My mom really liked their baked potato and chili, so whenever we had the chance to grab lunch or dinner there—which usually happened when we were away from home—we did. One of the places we visited regularly was down the shore. A day at the beach or boardwalk often ended with a trip to Wendy’s, where we all ordered our favorite meals. But that all changed one late summer night in the late eighties when we were in Wildwood, NJ. That’s when we were introduced to the Wendy’s SuperBar.

Wendy’s SuperBar. What a Spread!

The SuperBar Experience

When we first walked in, we were confused by the signage. We’d seen salad bars at fast-food places before, but nothing like this. It was as if they took the standard salad bar concept and expanded it into multiple stations. Instead of just cold salads, they offered hot foods as well. You paid one price per person, and it was all-you-can-eat. This was too good a deal for us to pass up. So we found a table in the corner of the restaurant, paid for each of us, and got to work.

Exploring the Stations

The SuperBar had three stations: Italian, Mexican, and Garden Spot Salads. Salad bars were old hat by this point, and I’d say this one covered most of the basics. You had leafy lettuce and other sliced raw vegetables for your base, and you could finish with croutons and your choice of dressing. Like many, I preferred the creamy dressings—and way too much of it.

Since this was the “cold station,” it was also home to the dessert bar, which meant you often began and ended your SuperBar meal here. Desserts were simple but plentiful. My favorite was the butterscotch pudding, but they also had chocolate and vanilla, as well as assorted cut fresh fruit.

At the Italian station, you would first choose one of three pastas: rotini, rotini with vegetables, or fettuccine. Then you’d pick a sauce—marinara, meat sauce, or creamy Alfredo. You could grab a few slices of garlic toast, and you were done. That was until later in the year, when they added pizza to the menu. That was a game-changed for me. It might not have been the best pizza, but a lot of mediocre pizza is pretty great when you are a kid. Now, New Jersey has a strong pasta culture, so I didn’t need instructions on how to handle these ingredients. But the final station was very new to me: they wanted me to do something I had never done before—build a burrito.

At the time, New Jersey didn’t have a thriving Mexican food scene. Even Taco Bells were few and far between. But here was a chance to try an Americanized Mexican fast-food experience in the form of a burrito or taco, and I wasn’t going to pass it up. You were encouraged to build your creation on a flour tortilla or crispy corn taco shell, but it wasn’t a requirement. You could add refried beans, meat, shredded lettuce, cheese, rice, salsa, sour cream, olives, and jalapeños.

What I really liked were the tortilla chips, and I would snack on them frequently after finishing my main meal while waiting for my family to finish eating. They would have made for a fun nacho plate if they had a method for melting the cheese. Many of the items at the Mexican station also made great add-ons for the baked potato from their standard menu. If I remember correctly, you were allowed to top your potato with items from any of the stations—although maybe we were just bending the rules!

Expansion and the Popularity of the SuperBar

We went to this SuperBar twice, but eventually, we got a Wendy’s closer to home that also had a SuperBar, so we no longer needed to travel far to enjoy it. The first SuperBars were tested in early 1987 in company-owned stores and were a success, increasing sales by about 15 percent. Toward the end of 1987, Wendy’s did a big advertising push and planned to spend $35 million to install them in all 1,120 company-owned locations by the summer of 1988. They also offered financing for franchisees to help them install the buffets, each of which cost between $30,000 and $35,000.

The SuperBar was priced at $2.99 for lunch and $3.59 for dinner, with kids eating for $1.99 at launch. These prices were often reduced with various coupons and offers they ran at the time. Amazingly, by the last year of the SuperBar, prices had hardly changed much. It remained a good value for about a decade.

Many questioned whether this was a good move for Wendy’s. They speculated that it wasn’t part of their core business model and wouldn’t succeed. Similar bars had been tried for decades by other restaurants and were shown to be challenging to maintain. At the time, the chain Rax had a very similar system, and they were supposedly designed by the same people.

Wendy’s wasn’t exactly desperate, but sales had been declining each year since peaking during the “Where’s the Beef?” phase in 1984. Wendy’s needed something to bring people back, and they hoped this would appeal to customers who wanted more than just a burger (vegetarians also appreciated the options). This approach would help them avoid directly competing with the then-dominant McDonald’s and Burger King.

The End of an Era

Over the years, SuperBars started appearing in stores across the country. The hype around them peaked as the eighties ended, but Wendy’s continued to promote the concept with meal deals, coupons, and, of course, menu changes. One of my family’s favorite additions was the seafood options. By the mid-nineties, however, the SuperBar had run out of steam, and before the end of the decade, they were all gone. The trend of food bars at fast-food restaurants had run its course, leaving fans to mourn their absence.

Was the food high quality? Not really. Were all the SuperBars well-maintained? Not by a long shot, but if you were on a budget and wanted to fill up on something that wasn’t your standard fast food offering, Wendy’s was giving you an option. That more than made up for the often mixed quality.

The Wendy’s SuperBar might be a memory now, but it represents a time when fast food was experimenting and pushing boundaries in ways that surprised and delighted customers. Though it eventually disappeared, the SuperBar left a lasting impression on those who experienced it, reminding us that even in the fast-paced world of quick service, there’s always room for a little bit of creativity and a lot of food.