You may have memorized the Denny's menu front to back and eaten every possible combination
of the Grand Slam breakfast, but that doesn't mean you know everything there is to know about
this chain's long history. It's been open since 1953, and a lot has gone down in all those years.
After a night of chugging champagne, big, greasy breakfast platters are a delightful hangover cure.
But at Denny's in Manhattan, the bubbly is actually paired with your Grand Slam.
To make the first New York City location of the restaurant chain stand out, the Grand Cru Slam
combo was added to the menu. For $300, you get a bottle of Dom Perignon Premier Cru champagne
and two Grand Slam breakfasts. And before you ask, it's the same low-end breakfast fare you'd find at
any other Denny's. The only difference is that it's just paired with a very expensive beverage.
This Denny's is located right in Manhattan's Financial District,
so it's easy to imagine Wall Street types celebrating big stock market victories with
a quick champagne-and-pancake breakfast. The location even has luxe leather booths,
and it also serves craft cocktails for those who aren't fans of champagne.
So if you're ever in the mood to combine high and low food culture, you know where to go.
"It's like a perfect, a perfect mix with
Denny's breakfast, even though it might not seem so on the price scale."
Las Vegas weddings are known to be unconventional, and with more than 100,000 ceremonies performed
in the city each year, it kind of makes sense that Denny's would get in the matrimony game.
When the chain opened its location on Vegas' historic Fremont Street in 2013,
they decided to meld it with the local culture. So they designed it to have
show-stopping neon lights, steel, and curves in keeping with the
neighborhood's existing architecture. And then they added a wedding chapel.
For $199, happy couples get the use of the chapel and photo booth, a silk bouquet and boutonniere,
a wedding cake made out of Denny's Pancake Puppies, a champagne toast, two commemorative
wedding t-shirts, and a coupon for two original Grand Slam breakfasts. Perhaps that last one
can be enjoyed the morning after the wedding night? That's plenty of bang for your buck,
but if that price tag is still too steep for your budget, you may still be in luck. In 2018, Denny's
offered a romantic Valentine's Day discount, with wedding packages starting at just $99 per couple.
It's no secret that a career in fast food isn't typically a stairway to massive success,
no matter what the employee handbook might tell you. But one former Denny's waitress beat the
odds and managed to make her way from server to the largest Denny's franchise owner in the world.
Dawn Lafreeda started working at the chain when she was a teenager,
and she continued working there through college while also taking an accounting and management
job at a software company. She purchased her first Denny's franchise at the age of 23,
and then she revamped four other locations in Texas. After turning those businesses around,
she kept at it, eventually owning 90 Denny's restaurants in 7 states altogether. At the time,
she owned more Denny's franchises than anybody else in the company.
Lafreeda has been working as a Denny's franchise owner for more than 30 years now,
and her company Den-Tex Inc. has an annual revenue
of about $85 million. Not too shabby for what began as a high school waitressing job!
A lot of restaurants that are now household names were actually called something else when they were
first opened, and Denny's is among them. When the chain was founded in 1953 by Harold Butler
and Richard Jezak, it was actually a donut stand called Danny's Donuts in Lakewood,
California. Within three years there were eight restaurants.
Jezak eventually left the company, and Butler then revamped the chain, evolving it from a
donut store to a coffee shop with a more robust menu. Even then the stand was open 24 hours a day,
but it still wasn't Denny's quite yet. In 1956 the name was changed to Danny's Coffee Shops.
It wasn't until 1959 that the restaurant became Denny's Coffee Shops,
so people wouldn't get it confused with the Los Angeles spot Coffee Dan's. Then in 1961
the name was shortened to just Denny's, which is of course how we know and love it today.
Denny's hasn't been immune to controversy over the years,
and one of the most notable examples was a spate of lawsuits filed against the chain
in the early 90s for racial discrimination. Black customers, including six Secret Service agents,
joined together in two class-action lawsuits against Denny's. They accused restaurant
employees of ejecting black customers, using racial epithets, segregating black
customers from white customers, not honoring advertised specials for Black customers,
and also attempting to limit the number of Black customers in a location at a given time.
Denny's ultimately settled the lawsuits for $54 million total. The money was paid out to thousands
of people across the country, and as part of the deal, Denny's agreed to revamp how the company
prevents and addresses racial discrimination issues. It was a historic settlement, and in fact
the largest amount of monetary damages ever issued for a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Denny's changes to its company policies included a series of sweeping reforms. The chain donated
$450,000 for college scholarships to organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,
began sensitivity training for their employees, and started using a secret diner program to
check for discrimination. They also appointed a civil monitor to be in charge of investigating
discrimination claims and agreed to make sure that at least a quarter of all people
in their ads were people of color and that at least 20 percent of them were black. Most of
these measures are still in place, though Denny's has still come under fire several times since then
for racial bias and discrimination, including as recently as 2018 in Florida.
"The company tells me it has completed its investigation,
and the employee involved in last Friday's incident no longer works here."
Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron is widely considered one of the greatest
players of all time. Over the course of his career, he hit 755 home runs,
passing the previous record set by Babe Ruth and maintaining that title until Barry Bonds passed
him in 2007. When Hammerin' Hank retired from the game in 1976, Denny's decided to
honor him the following year the best way they knew how: by creating a new breakfast option.
Called the Grand Slam breakfast, this now-iconic meal lets customers put together four different
items to create a plate, along with potatoes or toast. In a classic Grand Slam, there are
13 foods to choose as one of the four on your platter. The chain also serves up special combos,
like the Belgian Waffle Slam, and the Fit Slam, which featured an egg white omelet, turkey bacon,
an English muffin, and fruit. As far as restaurant breakfasts go, you could almost
say that at this point, the Grand Slam breakfast is just as legendary as Hank Aaron himself.
"Home run!"
Denny's serves more than 400 million eggs each year. So in 2016, when they announced a shift
to serving 100 percent cage-free eggs by the year 2026, it was a big deal. That's because
corporate demand for huge quantities of cage-free eggs is actually changing farming as we know it.
According to the USDA, more than 70 percent of U.S. egg demand is coming from companies
that are switching to cage-free eggs within the next decade. Because of that, cage-free eggs will
actually become the norm soon, which will have a huge effect on the welfare of hen-laying chickens.
Along with its commitment to switching up their egg suppliers, Denny's also worked with The Humane
Society to start sourcing pork from farms that don't place mother pigs in gestation crates.
The company also has requirements in place to ensure that their beef, turkey, and chickens
are humanely raised and slaughtered as well. So if you're eating meat or eggs at Denny's,
you can rest assured that it comes from farms that are actually concerned with animal welfare.
In 1994, Denny's became the largest corporate sponsor of the Save the Children charity. Not
coincidentally, this was the year after their racial discrimination lawsuits were settled.
Scholarly papers have even been written about how working with the charity was a mutually
beneficial way for the chain to rehab its image and for Save the Children to raise awareness
of its mission. Even if the partnership was formed with a self-serving purpose,
it's hard to argue with any company's philanthropy.
Along with Save the Children, Denny's also works with Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry program,
through which they've funded more than 43 million meals for hungry kids in the past six years. The
chain has also created a scholarship program called "Hungry for Education," which works
with the regional United Way chapter near their company headquarters and raises money for the
Miami-based organization Tour de Force. So the next time you're at Denny's trying to
decide whether or not you should really buy that extra order of Pancake Puppies,
you can know that some of your money will be contributing to some worthy causes.
"I'm just so grateful that Denny's gave me this opportunity."
The Grand Slam is Denny's hallmark breakfast.
You could even go so far as to say that it's a time-honored American tradition.
But what happens when you offer a free plate to every American citizen during one of the
nation's most popular televised events? To that question, Denny's basically said:
hold my milkshake, and let's find out. In 2009, the company took out a 30-second Super Bowl ad
promising free Grand Slams on the following Tuesday between the hours of 6 A.M. and 2 P.M.
"This Tuesday, from 6:00 A.M. to 2:00,
Denny's is giving a free Grand Slam to everyone in America. Seriously."
This was a bold move considering the game's historically high viewership.
That year's edition of the Super Bowl actually had an unusually low number of viewers.
But by Super Bowl standards, "unusually low" still means plenty of eyeballs,
as 98.7 million viewers tuned in, and more than 2 million took Denny's up on their offer.
The promotion ultimately exceeded the company's expectations with
more than 1,000 free Slams per franchise location. That might seem like it would
be expensive enough to bankrupt an entire business, but it was actually affordable
considering the typical multi-million dollar budget of a Super Bowl ad campaign.
Denny's was expected to have spent about $5 million between the food and securing the ad spot.
A food industry consultant who spoke to AdAge estimated that the breakfasts cost
Denny's between $1 and $1.50 each, which is almost entirely offset if a customer purchases a coffee.
Furthermore, Denny's CEO Nelson Marchioli told CNN that he expected to break even.
Ghost kitchens may just be the restaurants of the future.
These kitchens and the virtual food businesses they support were popularized during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Restaurants were largely shuttered for indoor dining at this time,
thus forcing patrons to turn to food-delivery apps like Seamless and Uber Eats.
While the pandemic allowed brand new ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants to thrive,
chain restaurants have also jumped on the trend. For example,
when delivery app users discovered that the seemingly local establishment Pasqually's
Pizza & Wings was actually just Chuck E. Cheese, it led to some significant criticism.
Other virtual brands have been more transparent, with the likes of Chili's and Maggiano's
using their kitchens to serve up meals for "It's Just Wings" and Applebee's launching Cosmic Wings.
Denny's has also been a significant player in this trend, as it launched two virtual
restaurant brands: The Burger Den and The Meltdown, which serve burgers and melts,
as the names indicate. Though the brands were only announced in January 2021,
Denny's was actually ahead of its competition. As Denny's Vice President of Guest Experience
and Marketing Technology Dave Coltrin told Food On Demand, the idea for the Burger Den
was actually first developed in 2019. The pandemic then made the company reevaluate their strategy,
and they ended up launching their two brands simultaneously.
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