Yankee Doodle Dandy – They Were More Than Just Hamburgers

I love a good fast-food hamburger and I will go out of my way to try one from a chain or independent I have never tried before. So wherever I have lived, I tend to be a connoisseur of the local fast-food eateries.

My passion for all things retro crosses over with this when I look for the remnants of chains I never had the opportunity to enjoy. Sometimes you find print material like ads or in some cases commercials that will give you clues as to what sort of stuff they were serving.

Someone mentioned a Chicago area chain to be the other day called Yankee Doodle Dandy that went out of business at some point in the 1980s. I had never heard of them, so I did a quick search and found some information and some great commercials.

Yankee Doodle Dandy was a fast-food restaurant chain that was founded in 1966 by Chris and Bill Proyce as the Tankee Doodle House in Bensenville, Illinois. By 1976 they had 27 restaurants, 20 of them were franchised and 7 were owned by the Proyce brothers.

In the eighties, the Proyce brothers decided to get out of the fast-food industry and instead moved into casual dining. They would covert four of their seven restaurants to Bailey’s Restaurant & Bars, they would close the rest.

Sadly this meant the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy and soon after the entire chain closed.

As you will see in these commercials, they have some pretty tasty looking food. But from the way they are trying to show that they are more than hamburgers, I am led to believe that trouble from the larger burger chains might have been putting pressure on them to expand their niche. This is probably why they moved towards becoming Bailey’s Restaurant & Bar.

Anyone ever eat at a Yankee Doodle Dandy? Was it any good?

“Hey, Kid! Did you know you could even have the best birthday ever at Yankee Doodle Dandy?”