The Legendary Fast Food Burger Chain That Started In A Gas Station

When you're perched at a booth inside Steak 'n Shake, admiring the retro diner décor (which you can replicate in your own kitchen!), wondering if a burger is a sandwich, and maybe slugging down a milkshake, you may not be thinking about the chain's history. It's a fascinating tale, however — and it stretches back a lot further than you might have guessed!

In the early 1930s, before McDonald's or Burger King, Gus and Edith Belt were two American entrepreneurs trying to make a living ... but circumstances kept complicating things. For one, the Great Depression was in full swing, and business was down at their gas stations. The Belts started slinging fried chicken and beer behind the pumps of their flagship location at a converted house that they called The Shell Inn, but their hometown of Normal, Indiana, was considering disallowing alcohol sales, even though Prohibition had been repealed. The Belts opted to pivot again and began selling fresh steakburgers. The concept was a hit, and the restaurant was rechristened "The White House Steak-n-Shake."

Gus Belt was something of a showman. He touted the high quality of his beef and would give hands-on demonstrations of grinding meat, which was a critical show of integrity during a time when ground beef was somewhat distrusted by the American public. It may have been a move that he gleaned from J. Walter Anderson, the founder of White Castle, along with the word "white" in the name of the restaurant — it was meant to convey sanitation and wholesomeness. Gus Belt also aimed to have customers fed within five minutes of ordering, and out the door in 20 minutes or less.

Nowadays, Steak 'n Shake's corporate ethos revolves around the quality of its ingredients, its competitive wages for employees, and leaning fully on emerging technology like Bitcoin. There's a difference between fast food and fast casual, but Steak 'n Shake tries to embrace the best of both worlds, with the steakburgers offering a premium burger option in a competitive field. The company's fairly recent choice to compete with the likes of McDonald's and Burger King is a marked change from its historical status as a sitdown eatery where customers were served by waiters. The shift in format came about after the Great Recession sent Steak 'n Shake on a sharp slide towards certain doom, with the brand rapidly losing money and market share. Not only did the company close underperforming stores and switch to a fast food model, but it also went back to basics and tried to improve its offerings: Burgers got bigger, and fries were cooked in beef tallow instead of vegetable oil.

Almost a century after its founding, Steak 'n Shake is still proudly serving the steakburgers that made it famous. Today, customers place orders at kiosks and gather their food from a counter. Rather than considering this change a downgrade, we actually think the Belt spouses would have approved of the "new" model. Gus and Edith built a business on efficiency, delivering yummy burgers to folks in a lickety-split manner. In some ways, the modern Steak 'n Shake is closer to its roots than it has been in a long time.