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The house that KFC built, but burritos live in.
The big booths, bold colors, and quirky roof shapes of chain restaurants were built to be memorable. It’s architecture and design as branding, and it works. Even when a company or one of its eerily similar locations goes to the big interstate in the sky, the design remains imprinted—on the city and in the brains of its customers.
Sitting down to dim sum in a former chain restaurant is like recognizing a character actor in a new movie—the costume and accent may have changed, but it’s still the same person. Unfortunately, there’s no IMDB for local restaurants, just barely penetrable city property records and the memories of our elders.
Even the rapid growth of the Seattle area hasn’t bulldozed every former chain restaurant building, and these local dining spots turn the signature quirks of their original tenants into something entirely their own.
It’s not just a lumpy building, it’s a rootbeer keg.
Roosevelt
I have been eating Chinese food at this oddly lumpy building at the beginning of Lake City Way for quite literally my entire life—the New Peking House that occupied it was the first restaurant my parents took me out to as a newborn. I had my wedding weekend welcome dinner there, and the handmade noodles are such a staple of celebrations in my household that my children ask whose birthday it is when we order them. But I was well into adulthood before I learned it wasn’t just a weird building, but one shaped like a root beer keg. The Rutherford’s Triple-XXX Barrel opened in 1940, “Incorporating the huge barrel which is the nationwide trademark of the independently owned outlets of the Galveston-Houston Breweries Inc.,” per an ad at the time.
Renton
The ornate colored glass chandeliers, patterned rugs, and signs to the prayer rooms speak to Cafe Sabah’s menu of classic Turkish foods. But the specific light hunter green of the tables and large booths, the metal tubing dividing those booths, and the wood beadboard walls all hint at its original tenant. How different, really, is the meat-covered flatbread of lahmajun from the meat-covered flatbread of Oregon-based chain Pietro’s Pizza? OK, pretty different. Plus, neither Pietro’s nor later occupant Amante ever served Turkish breakfast platters nor eggplant kebabs. The pastry case in the front is still put to good use, though, filled with variations on baklava and plates of Turkish custard.
The drive-through disappeared when the KFC became Rancho Bravo, but it has since been revived.
Capitol Hill
Technically, this one is still a chain, since it became the local Mexican restaurant’s fifth location, but one still clearly haunted by the fast-food ghosts of its past. In 2009, Rancho Bravo converted the empty Kentucky Fried Chicken into a taco shop, even re-opening the drive-through in 2015. It briefly became another Mexican restaurant before the family behind Burritos California and Aliberto’s Jr took over the squat building on the edge of Cal Anderson Park. This strategy isn’t new for the Aliberto’s Jr folks—their Aurora location is a former Taco Time and the Renton outpost was an Arby’s.
Renton
Good dim sum restaurants and late–twentieth century chain restaurants have surprisingly similar needs: a big waiting area to fit the large groups, large tables to fit a gluttonous feast, and lots of them to pack in the crowds. But where the famous salad bar of Canadian chain the Keg Steakhouse and Bar once offered giant bowls of iceberg lettuce and black olives, fish tanks now show off the live seafood offered on Triumph Valley’s menu. Where folks once dug into shrimp cocktail baked potatoes, they now eat shrimp har gau and purple yam mochi balls. While some of the multiple rooms and spaces in this Renton dim sum specialist hide it better than others, the heavy wood fixtures and sections of exposed brick wall hint at its previous life. After more than 20 years, the Keg closed its Renton location in 2012; Triumph Valley opened in the space in 2021.
