For nearly a quarter-century, a Frisch’s Big Boy held court on West Colonial Drive. Out front, the chain’s famous mascot hoisted a double-decker burger over one of the city’s busiest roads like a trophy. The restaurant opened in 1968, closed in 1992, and spent the years in between feeding west-side families burgers, onion rings, and more than a few slices of Hot Fudge Cake.
It’s been gone for more than three decades, but bring it up with a group of longtime Orlandoans and the stories start flowing. Someone will rave about the tartar sauce. Someone else will swear it was called Bob’s. (It wasn’t, and we’ll get to that.) Behind all the nostalgia sits a fun slice of local history involving a Cincinnati burger empire, a citrus beauty queen, a mascot identity crisis, and one summer Sunday when the grills went cold for good.
Table of Contents
A Beauty Queen, a Shovel, and a Lot of Orange Juice
Every good Orlando story from the 1960s seems to include a citrus connection, and this one is no exception. At the 1968 groundbreaking, the ceremonial crew included Nova Ramsey of Titusville, who arrived with an impressive pair of titles: Tangerine Bowl Queen and the Florida Citrus Commission’s "Miss OJ Break." Yes, orange juice had its own royalty. It was Florida, after all.
The Orange County Regional History Center, which preserved a photo of the moment, notes that this was the third Frisch’s Big Boy outlet in the Orlando area. The timing tells you a lot about the city back then. Colonial Drive was one of the region’s main east-west highways, and a family restaurant along it needed three things to succeed: a roomy parking lot, a sign big enough to catch a driver’s eye, and a name people already trusted.
The regulars were locals from Pine Hills, Orlo Vista, College Park, and the neighborhoods tucked along the west side, looking for a good meal that didn’t break the family budget.
Why It Was Frisch’s Big Boy, Not Bob’s
Here’s the mix-up that has fueled countless friendly arguments. The story starts in 1946, when Cincinnati restaurateur Dave Frisch attended a restaurant convention in California and met Bob Wian, the creator of a double-decker hamburger called the Big Boy. Frisch got permission to use the concept, then put his own spin on it by swapping the dressing for a tangy tartar sauce. That one change became the brand’s calling card, and it’s the flavor Central Floridians still bring up first.
The Big Boy system worked like a patchwork of regional licensees. They shared the burger and the mascot but ran under different company names and sometimes different menus. Frisch’s claimed Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Florida as its territory, which is how a Midwestern burger landed on Colonial Drive.
You could even tell the two apart by looking at the statue. The Frisch’s Big Boy mascot was slimmer than his Bob’s counterpart and wore striped trousers instead of checkered ones, a detail the History Center pointed out when it shared the West Colonial photo. Think of them as cousins who share a last name and a love of double-deckers but show up to the family reunion in different pants.
Florida was no afterthought for the company. By 1970, Frisch’s had grown to roughly 200 restaurants, and a 1959 Frisch’s menu still survives in the University of South Florida’s Florida Restaurant Menu Collection. That means the brand had Sunshine State roots nearly a decade before anyone put a shovel in the ground on West Colonial.
Life on the West Colonial Strip
The address put the restaurant just west of Orange Blossom Trail, right in the middle of the west side’s busiest shopping stretch. Nearby, the property at 3201 W. Colonial Drive cycled through a parade of grocery names over the years, from Grand Way and Food Fair to Pantry Pride, Winn-Dixie, and later Saverite.
Zoom out a little and the memories pile up fast. Former Pine Hills and Orlo Vista residents recall a lineup of Kmart, Montgomery Ward, Food World, Parkwood Plaza Cinema, Steak and Shake, and plenty of roadside chains that have long since disappeared. This was the west side’s main street in all but name, a place where a family could fill a grocery cart, catch a movie, and pick up school shoes without crossing town. Lunch or dinner at the Frisch’s Big Boy fit right into that kind of Saturday.
Booths, Onion Rings, and Hot Fudge Cake
The double-decker with tartar sauce got top billing, but every Frisch’s Big Boy operated as a full-service family restaurant. Families could slide into a booth, order breakfast or dinner from a server, and still get the burger everyone came for. The supporting cast was strong, too: onion rings, crinkle-cut fries, fish sandwiches, soups, pies, and the Hot Fudge Cake that still inspires serious loyalty.
That format landed the restaurant in a sweet spot between the old drive-in and the modern fast-food counter. It also explains why people remember the building and the statue as vividly as the food. This wasn’t a grab-a-bag-and-go kind of place. It was a slide-into-a-booth-and-stay-awhile kind of place, the sort of spot where kids begged for dessert and parents actually got to finish their coffee.
Meet the Rest of the Family
The West Colonial Frisch’s Big Boy wasn’t Orlando’s first, and it wasn’t alone. Its older sibling on East Colonial Drive near Bumby Avenue opened in 1966, and locals place it on the south side of Colonial just east of Bumby. Another long-running Frisch’s Big Boy stood on Lee Road, and folks also remember locations around Aloma and Semoran. At its peak, the company ran 12 restaurants across Florida.
For a stretch of the 1970s and 1980s, that made Frisch’s a familiar part of Orlando’s growing restaurant scene. Tourism boomed, the suburbs spread, and the Frisch’s Big Boy statues kept smiling at traffic on both sides of town.
The Year Big Boy Almost Got Benched
By the mid-1980s, the folks at headquarters were wondering whether their chubby-cheeked mascot still connected with customers. A 1985 Orlando Sentinel story took that question straight to the staff at the East Colonial restaurant, where service leader Kim Noreault and other employees weighed in. The local verdict was clear: keep the Big Boy.
The trouble was never a lack of love. The Frisch’s Big Boy brand was fighting for Florida diners against national fast-food giants, coffee shops, breakfast spots, buffets, and a newer wave of casual-dining chains. Company executives would later describe Florida as a difficult, highly competitive market, which is a polite way of saying everyone wanted a piece of the Orlando appetite.
Frisch’s Heads Home to Ohio
From 1989 to 1991, under Craig Maier, Frisch’s sold or reorganized its company-operated restaurants in Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas and pointed its growth back toward its Ohio home base. West Colonial wasn’t struggling on its own. It was caught up in a much bigger pullback.
In 1991, the company decided that three Central Florida restaurants and one in Tampa couldn’t be made profitable and sold them to franchisee James L. Shannon. He was hardly a newcomer. Shannon had spent 21 years with Frisch’s, from 1970 to 1991, working his way up from manager to area supervisor to area vice president. If anyone knew how to run a Frisch’s Big Boy, it was him. His professional profile later lists him as the owner of Shannon’s Casual Cafe in Orlando, so he never strayed far from the local dining business.
Last Call on July 26, 1992
The franchise run lasted about a year. On July 26, 1992, Shannon closed all three of his Central Florida Frisch’s Big Boy restaurants. He said he had no plans to open another Big Boy and kept his reasons close to the vest, saying only that "the businesses were fine."
Louis Ullman, Frisch’s senior vice president of finance, offered the corporate explanation: the units hadn’t turned a profit, and Florida’s crowded restaurant scene made the market tough. The company added that reopening the three shuttered spots was unlikely.
By August, the Lee Road location was the last Frisch’s Big Boy standing in Central Florida. The History Center’s record says the West Colonial restaurant operated until 1992, which lines up neatly with that three-store shutdown. All signs point to West Colonial being one of the restaurants that closed on that July Sunday.
The Burger Joint West Orlando Still Talks About
The West Colonial Frisch’s Big Boy arrived as roadside family dining spread along Orlando’s highways, thrived as suburbs and tourism reshaped the region, and faded as the restaurant industry consolidated around national chains.
A few pieces of its story are still a bit of a mystery. Public records haven’t yet revealed what replaced the building, exactly when it came down, or the precise day the doors first opened after that 1968 groundbreaking. Those answers are likely waiting in old building permits, property cards, and yellowed newspaper ads, and the History Center’s photo of Nova Ramsey and the groundbreaking crew remains one of the best snapshots of the restaurant’s early days. Chances are, plenty of family photo albums around Pine Hills hold a few more.
What isn’t a mystery is why people remember it. A 24-year run is long enough to span a childhood and then some. Kids who ordered Hot Fudge Cake there in the early 1970s could have been bringing their own kids by the late 1980s. That’s why the building still pops up in local nostalgia groups, and why the mascot’s striped trousers get remembered right alongside the tartar sauce.
The short version goes like this: Frisch’s opened its third Orlando-area Big Boy at 3240 W. Colonial in 1968, ran it as a classic sit-down family restaurant for about a quarter-century, handed it to a franchisee during a statewide pullback, and closed it with two sister restaurants on July 26, 1992. For a lot of west-side families, though, the Frisch’s Big Boy was simply where dinner happened, and where the tartar sauce set the bar for every burger that followed.
🔥 If you're fascinated by Orlando history like I am, well, there's plenty more where this came from, right here.
Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/thehistorycenter/posts/for-nationalhamburgerday-we-go-back-to-1968-and-the-groundbreaking-of-the-frisch/1117689227061245/
https://www.frischs.com/story/
https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/frischs-restaurants-inc
https://archives.lib.usf.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/6486
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zUNwm9GZ3D2rPIKwwAEqXsavtZOfYJvS1mmMuv9wpD8/htmlview
https://orlandomemory.org/places/remembering-pine-hills/
https://www.frischs.com/
http://extinctorlando.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1985/04/23/one-big-boy-to-go-frischs-39-year-old-symbol-may-not-fit-its-new-image/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1992/08/18/frischs-puts-closed-signs-on-3-eateries/
