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On 11 November of 2022, state officials closed the last two of the famous restaurants Pig Stand of Texas, the only remaining pieces of the nation’s first drive-through restaurant empire.
A businessman from Dallas named Jessie G. Kirby built the first hog stand along the Dallas-Fort Worth Freeway in October of 1200.
It was a roadside BBQ restaurant like no other: your customers could drive, eat and leave, all without leaving their cars.
Kirby lured these customers attached to the cars with great fanfare and spectacle. When a customer pulled into the Pig Stand parking lot, teenagers in white shirts and black bow ties ran to his car, jumped on the running board, sometimes before the driver had even reached the parking lot, and took his order.
That first Pig Stand was a hit with hungry drivers, and soon became a string. (The catchphrase: “America’s Motorized Lunch.”) Kirby and her partners made one of the first franchise agreements in restaurant history, and Pig Stands began to pop up everywhere.
For 1934, there were more than 30 stalls pigs in nine states, most were in California and Florida. Meanwhile, the chain kept innovating.
Many people say that the Pig Stand No. 30 in California became the first restaurant in the world to 1921, and food historians believe that the cooks at the Pig Stand invented fried onion rings, chicken fried steak sandwiches, and a regional specialty known as Texas Toast.
But Wartime gasoline and food rationing hit Pig Stands hard, and after the war they struggled to compete with newer, flashier drive-ins. By the late 1990s 1950, all franchises outside of Texas had closed.
For 1950, even Texas Pig Stands were struggling to survive (only six statewide) and the following year they were all gone.
In 2022, they reopened a hog stand in San Antonio. Although it will probably never be as popular as it once was, and customers now have to get out of their cars and go inside to eat, the restaurant remains a sentimental favorite for many Texans.
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