Roy Rogers, Fixin’s Bar and all, returns to the Philly area after three decades with a new restaurant in Cherry Hill

Nearly 30 years since the Philadelphia-area’s last Roy Rogers restaurants moseyed off into the sunset, the fast-food brand is returning Wednesday with a new location in Cherry Hill.

Pete and Jim Plamondon — Roy Rogers’ Frederick, Md.-based owners, and the sons of one of its early executives — had long heard pleas from Philadelphia nostalgics hankering for the ham-topped Double-R-Bar burger, the Gold Rush chicken sandwich with bacon and cheese, the signature roast beef sandwich ladled with jus, and trips to the Fixin’s Bar.

Roy Rogers, named after the actor/singer known as the King of the Cowboys, was a powerhouse in the Philadelphia region from its founding in 1968 under Marriott Corp., where the Plamondons’ father, Pete Sr., ran the fast-food division. He left Marriott in 1979 to become a Roy Rogers franchisee.

At the chain’s peak in the late 1980s, there were nearly 650 locations. With about 140 stores in the Philadelphia area, it was the region’s second-largest fast-food brand, behind McDonald’s. After Marriott sold it in 1990 to Hardee’s, Roy Rogers began a decade of decline as the stores became Hardee’s, McDonald’s, and Boston Chicken outlets.

In 2002, the Plamondon brothers bought the brand, which had about 70 locations, though most of the franchise agreements were expiring. They have expanded slowly over their 23 years, and expect to open about one company-owned restaurant a year.

With the bulk of their restaurants clustered in Maryland, West Virginia, and northern Virginia, “we’d been reluctant to come and do something up here,” Jim Plamondon said in an interview last week.

“Our stores are tough to run, and the farther out you go, the harder it is.” (Two seashore locations in Ocean County, N.J., are franchises, as are seven eateries at Pennsylvania Turnpike rest stops.)

Bringing Roy Rogers back not only to the Philadelphia region but to his hometown was especially satisfying to Joe Briglia, Roy Rogers’ director of franchise development and a 1973 graduate of Cherry Hill High School West, who recalled regularly hopping a fence with friends in the early 1970s to frequent the chain at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop.

The Cherry Hill location will be Roy Rogers’ 40th location, the 24th owned by the company. If it succeeds, the Plamondon brothers hope to franchise in the Philadelphia area.

Jim Plamondon, 61, acknowledged that he and his brother, 66, were counting on the nostalgia factor to attract customers to Cherry Hill. The new store looks brighter than the ones of old, which were done up in muted orange and brown.

“They might remember it when they were 10 years old and now they’re 40 years old or whatever,” Plamondon said. “Nostalgia is a great thing. People only remember the good. But you have to deliver. The key for us is to be attractive to the next generation.”

Nostalgia is what drew Tanya Anderson, 43, the new location’s general manager, to Roy Rogers. She grew up in Southwest Philadelphia and frequented the one on Market Street in Center City with her mother. “I remember the fried chicken and the Double-R-Bar burger were so amazing,” Anderson said. She was a manager for MOD Pizza when she learned that Roy Rogers was opening in Cherry Hill. “I said, ‘I have to be here.’”

Roy Rogers — whose sales of beef, chicken, and burgers are equal — boasts a varied, labor-intensive menu that is an anomaly in an industry that values leanness and automation. Workers slow-roast beef, hand-bread chicken (tenders as well as bone-in pieces), and flip burgers as soon as the orders hit the kitchen. Besides the usual fries and onion rings, Roy’s also offers sides, such as baked beans, coleslaw, and mashed potatoes. Opening time is 7 a.m. for breakfast.

Few other fast-food outlets offer the equivalent of the Fixin’s Bar, a costly part of the business that allows customers to top sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles, and peppers, and squirt on five sauces plus ketchup. Plamondon said half of his business is dine-in because of the Fixin’s Bar, while comparable eateries may do 85% of their business in the drive-through.

“We’ve got 39 restaurants and we’re competing with McDonald’s, which has 15,000 in North America. Wendy’s has 6,400, and Burger King has 7,000,” Plamondon said. “We have to provide a different experience for our customers. We’re not on TV like they are. I have to demonstrate great food and be a cut above.” He said his reward is when people tell him: “I don’t eat fast food, but I eat at Roy Rogers.”

The hype is very much alive in Cherry Hill. It’s fair to say people were triggered last November, after a commenter on the South Jersey Food Scene Facebook group posted that Cherry Hill had been listed among Roy Rogers’ locations. Group founder Marilyn Johnson called the corporate office for confirmation.

“The excitement was unmistakable,” Johnson said. The news became one of most viral stories the group had ever posted, with more than 6,000 reactions, almost 2,000 comments, and nearly 1,800 shares — “not to mention, almost weekly posts inquiring if anybody knew the opening date,” Johnson said. “The frenzy surrounding this long-awaited opening is impossible to ignore.”

The Roy Rogers restaurant brand has deep roots in the Plamondon family, beginning with Pete Plamondon Sr., who started working for Marriott Corp. in 1965 after a stint at Stouffer’s. At Marriott, he launched and ran the fast-food division, which included Junior Hot Shoppes.

When Marriott acquired the Midwest-based RoBee’s Roast Beef chain in 1968, a competitor, Arby’s, sued RoBee’s for trademark infringement, alleging that the brand “RoBee’s” was too similar to its own. Marriott liked RoBee’s Western theme, and it so happened that a member of Marriott’s board of directors knew Roy Rogers’ agent. A licensing agreement was made with the actor/singer, known as the King of the Cowboys and famed for his western TV shows and movies; his horse, Trigger; and his signature song, “Happy Trails.”

The first Roy Rogers opened in Falls Church, Va., in 1968. Subsequently, Marriott converted the Junior Hot Shoppes restaurants to Roy Rogers and began to expand across the country.

Pete Plamondon Sr. rose to executive vice president of Marriott’s restaurant division, overseeing Roy Rogers, Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlours, Big Boy Restaurants, and a number of casual “dinner houses.”

In 1979, Plamondon left Marriott to become a Roy Rogers franchisee in Frederick, Md. In the 1990s, his sons, Pete Plamondon Jr. (formerly in commercial real estate) and Jim Plamondon (a former prosecutor), joined the business, and bought it from their father in 1998. Pete Sr. died in 2020.

At its peak, Roy Rogers had 648 locations, including 72 locations of Gino’s that Marriott acquired in 1982.

In 1990, Marriott sold Roy Rogers to Hardee’s, which acquired it primarily for the real estate. Hardee’s aimed to rebrand Roy Rogers locations into Hardee’s in the Northeast, where it previously had little presence. However, the conversions failed, and through the 1990s, Hardee’s sold off Roy Rogers assets.

The 100-plus restaurants in the Philadelphia market went to Boston Chicken (later, Boston Market), the hundreds of locations in New York, New Jersey, and Long Island went to Wendy’s and Burger King, and 184 locations in the Washington-Baltimore region, Roy Rogers’ largest market, were sold to McDonald’s, giving them prime real estate and eliminating a strong competitor.

By 2002, the Roy Rogers brand had dwindled to about 70 stores, mostly franchises that were in the process of closing. That year, the Plamondon brothers bought the brand and trademark from Hardee’s parent company, Imasco, and began rebuilding from their base in Frederick, Md., the site of the family’s first Roy Rogers. With the opening of Cherry Hill, the brothers now oversee 40 Roy Rogers locations, 24 of them company-owned.