Rax Roast Beef Was a Forgotten Chain, Until It Became a Pilgrimage Site

You can thank Mr. Delicious for that.

On October 8, 2020, Hank Green, author, educator, and one-half of the popular YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, posted a video titled “The Commercial that Killed a Fast Food Chain.” The video featured vintage ads from the ‘80s and ‘90s for a fast food chain that has all but disappeared: Rax Roast Beef. Green explained the restaurants loomed large in his childhood, but had dwindled significantly in number after several bad marketing decisions including the introduction of an animated, possibly satirical, definitely unsettling spokesperson of sorts: Mr. Delicious.

The Viral Return of Mr. Delicious

The video racked up more than 7.5 million views (impressive even for the Vlogbrothers channel, which boasts 3+ million subscribers). Vlogbrother videos are known for kicking off unexpected trends among their fans like Pizzamas, an annual holiday based on a piece of fan art involving YA author John Green, sporting an impressive mustache, over the word “pizza.” (The image has graced T-shirts, blankets, and even a rug as part of the yearly celebration.) But a new fandom obsession has arrived: Since the  Rax Roast Beef video appeared, Nerdfighters, the Green brothers’ long-standing fandom community, have begun making pilgrimages to Rax.

Andrew Lorenzen, who first started watching Vlogbrothers videos as a teenager in 2007, made the trip in March of 2023 but returned in August of 2023 to eat in the dining area for the first time. For Lorenzen, the spot definitely seemed like a moment frozen in time, “The Rax in Joliet, Illinois, felt a bit like a time capsule (in the best possible way),” Lorenzen says. “Grow[ing] up in the ‘90s I remember other fast food restaurants like Wendy’s having a solarium in the dining area. The inside of this Rax had a somewhat eclectic mix of ‘50s diner furniture, western-themed signage on the walls, and a fair few cow paintings. The majority of fast food/fast casual restaurant chains desire uniformity, however, this Rax felt like it had developed its own unique vibe over a period of time.”

Jay Kidd, who remembers watching Brotherhood 2.0 (the earliest iteration of Vlogbrothers videos) after high school, hit up a Rax on a business trip to Daytona in October of last year, and found the spot he visited a little run down. “It was in rough shape,” Kidd says. “The whole place kind of seemed lost to time, in a way. If we hadn’t called ahead, we honestly would have assumed this was an abandoned restaurant. The whole thing had a very late ‘80s, early ‘90s vibe to it and the dining room was closed and absolutely stacked with boxes, and you couldn’t even walk in; drive-thru only. After a phone call with them, I found out they were doing renovations but wouldn’t have any indoor seating for the foreseeable future. We had to eat in our vehicle in the parking lot. So that was certainly different.” Still, even the abandoned feel couldn’t completely destroy the feeling of nostalgia. “I’m a ‘90s kid myself,” Kidd says, “and WOW it very much was nostalgic. I’d not heard of Rax before Hank’s first video (despite not living very far from one), and while it was in a state of deterioration, it was like looking into a time capsule of my childhood in the Midwest.”

Can Rax Return?

According to Rax’s official website (which is incredibly bare bones with no social media links and little to offer beyond the menu and some coupons), there are only eight remaining Rax restaurants in the U.S.: six in Ohio, one in Kentucky, and one in Illinois. However, if you head over to the RaxRestaurants community on Reddit, you’ll see true fans of the chain claim it’s down to six locations total, with just four in Ohio. That’s quite a fall from more than 500 locations after the chain's founding in 1967. 

Three and a half years after posting that first Rax video, the Green brothers made good on their planned pilgrimage, publishing a video titled "Hank and John Reunited WITH RAX" in early April 2024. The trek took the brothers five hours (though John admits, that number did include a 30-minute detour because of a wrong turn), making the journey worthwhile by ordering (and consuming) four different Rax roast beef sandwiches. Always artists, the Greens even took some time out of their road trip to create a Rax-themed parody song (to the tune of Fastball's "The Way"). The experience got a somewhat above-middling review from the Greens, though they pointed out the chain is still very much alive, saying, "There was a line of people in the drive-through. And only a few of those people were waiting to meet us."

Now the question is, does this close the book on the story of the Greens and Rax? With nearly 150,000 views and more than 900 comments on the video already, this might spawn a whole new wave of pilgrims to keep the chain alive and kicking.

Read the original article on All Recipes.