Eat'n Park is a restaurant chain based in Homestead, Pennsylvania, with 69 locations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. This chain is known as Smiley Cookies and has adopted the motto, "the place to smile".
Video Eat'n Park
Histori
In the late 1940s, Larry Hatch and Bill Peters became supervisors at Isaly's Restaurant in Pittsburgh. On the way to Cincinnati, Hatch was impressed by the Big Boy Drive In Frisch operation. He and Peters contact Big Boy founder, Bob Wian, reached a 25-year agreement to operate Big Boy Restaurant in the Pittsburgh area, which will be called Eat'n Park.
Eat'n Park was launched on June 5, 1949, when Hatch and Peters opened a drive-in 13-geret at Saw Mill Run Boulevard in the South Hills of Pittsburgh. Advertised as "Pittsburgh's First Modern Eating-In-Car Food-Eating Service", this location is served by 10 carhops. Four months later, a second unit was opened in Pittsburgh, in 1956: 11 units, 1960: 27 units, 1965: 30 units, and in 1973: 40 Eat'n Park locations. After leaving Big Boy, the chain entered Ohio and West Virginia, and eventually expanded to over 75 restaurants. By 2017, there are 69 Eat'n Park restaurants operating.
In 1974, Eat'n Park allowed their 25-year-old Big Boy franchise agreement to expire. It is openly associated with the termination of a hop car service - which ended in 1971 - but was largely motivated by the end of the $ 1 per year licensing fee that Eat'n Park enjoyed. As a result, Big Boy hamburgers were renamed Superburger. The non-renewed "Big Boy" agreement finally allowed Eat'n Park to expand into areas licensed to other Big Boy franchises. Eat'n Park expanded to Northeast Ohio including Greater Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown, and to West Virginia: the first Morgantown, followed by Clarksburg and Wheeling. (In 1977, Big Boy reassigned the Pittsburgh area to the Wheeling-based Big Boy from Elby.)
The company launched the Smiley Cookie signature in 1986 to coincide with adding bread to the location. Cookie Smiley comes from Warner's Bakery, a small bakery in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The Smiley Cookie will become so popular that it will eventually be added to its logo and will spawn Frownie brownie from competing Kings Family Restaurants, which will be controversially terminated in 2015 after Kings is sold to private equity firms. Eat'n Park filed several lawsuits against companies outside the restaurant's operating area to enforce its trademark in Cookie Smiley.
In 2011, Eat'n Park was awarded the Excellence Achievement Award from the American Culinary Federation.
While accepting debit & amp; credit card transactions, Eat'n Park is unusual in a restaurant business by having ATMs at every location. ATM was originally owned by SkyBank, and then Huntington Bank after the latter purchased SkyBank in 2007. ATMs are now operated by third party companies.
Since 2013, Eat'n Park has been a sponsor of the Pittsburgh Dad's YouTube series .
Maps Eat'n Park
Former location
While Eat'n Park currently serves western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and northern West Virginia, the chain used to serve the Harrisburg, Lancaster and York, Pennsylvania markets from the mid-1990s to 2010. At one time run five restaurants in the Harrisburg market alone, in 2010 only one is left in Harrisburg, and one each in New Cumberland, Lancaster, and York. In March 2010, the locations of New Cumberland and Lancaster were closed and sold, and on October 1, 2010 Eat'n Park closed two of their last county restaurants - York and Harrisburg locations - due to low sales.
Other concepts
Eat'n Park has expanded its offerings beyond many family restaurants, runs upscale restaurants as well as more casual dining areas.
To date, its most successful concept is the Hello Bistro , a fast casual chain focusing on Millennials that offers burgers and gourmet salads while keeping the parent company's relationship to a minimum by offering ready-made packaged cookies and brands from farms dressed as the main Eat'n Park chain, but instead made no reference to Eat'n Park. With six locations, Eat'n Park plans to expand the Hello Bistro concept throughout the Pittsburgh metropolitan area and potentially become a new market.
Smoking
Eat'n Park banned smoking throughout the chain on May 30, 2007, sixteen months before the state smoking ban enacted in Pennsylvania.
Christmas ads
The Christmas tradition in the Pittsburgh area is the annual airing of Eat'n Park advertisements featuring Christmas stars (named Sparkle) who struggle to reach the top of the Christmas tree until the tree bends to help the star. Released in 1982, to support the charity at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, the ads became so popular that Eat'n Park has been serving ads every year since, beginning in late November. Eat'n Park now sells merchandise around the holiday season based around the ad. Believed to be the longest Christmas commercial in the United States, longer than the national television commercials by Folgers, Hershey's Kisses, and M & M, as well as regional ads by Pennsylvania Lottery. Sparkle, Eat'n Park Star was a trademark by Eat'n Park in 1990 but was abandoned two years later.
References
External links
- Official website
- Website Smiley Cookie
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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