The All-American '70s Restaurant Chain Only Boomers Will Remember

Back in the 1970s when Houlihan's and Sizzler were all the rage, there was one chain that came and went so fast only Boomers are likely to remember it today. It was called Next Door and it featured hamburgers, curly fries, steak, shrimp platters, spaghetti, chili, and various sandwiches. The food was pretty standard but the chain's concept was unusual to say the least. It had a Revolutionary War theme with a red, white, and blue color scheme; brightly colored wooden soldiers on the walls; and phones located at each of the red-leather booths. You would order your food via the phone and when it was ready you'd go pick up your meal at the counter. Perhaps even more unusual than the ordering system was the company which owned the chain: Pizza Hut.

In the late 1960s Pizza Hut decided to expand into a new category with something similar to other casual dining chains and so it launched Next Door in 1969 in Wichita, Kansas, where the company was headquartered. By this time, Pizza Hut was well on the way to becoming the biggest pizza chain in the world, which it achieved in 1971. Next Door expanded quickly, but some would say too quickly. In 1972 there were 12 Next Door restaurants and not long after there were 16 stretched from Florida to California. But the chain's tagline "All America's Eating Next Door" wasn't quite true. In 1971, the new chain was already floundering.

The Next Door restaurant chain shared some design concepts with Pizza Hut, like a red roof and faux-Tiffany lamps, but it lacked profitability. In 1971, Frank L. Carney, Pizza Hut's then-president, admitted they'd expanded too quickly and said the company was adjusting its approach. "Experience has shown us that numerical and geographic expansion must not proceed faster than the related management and support systems," he told The Wichita Beacon at the time. Even so, it seemed Pizza Hut wasn't ready to give up just yet. The chain lingered on until 1974, when its parent company finally jettisoned it. 

This wasn't the only non-pizza related business Pizza Hut got into during this decade. It had two Mexican food related chains, Taco Boy and Fiesta Cantina, and a steakhouse called The Flaming Steer. Like Next Door, Pizza Hut eventually sold these others off. Jim Anderson, who'd been hired to manage the Next Door chain, would later buy one of its locations in Enid, Oklahoma. He then opened a second location and successfully ran them both for the next 25 years. "If Pizza Hut officers had taken expansion a little slower and not spread the stores so far from Wichita, they also would have had a winning concept to offer their franchisees," he wrote on his personal blog in 2014. Instead, Pizza Hut let its unusual burger and steak chain fall to the wayside, and it's now just a memory for Boomers (unlike Sizzler, which is still around).