#FlashbackFriday: Serving up Some Exchange Burger History for National Hamburger Day
Saturday, May 28, is National Hamburger Day, which aside from making #FlashbackFriday crave a bacon-cheeseburger inspires this look at the history of the burger in general and at the Exchange.
Installation commanders and Exchange managers at the groundbreaking of the first Burger King at California’s Edwards AFB, circa 1985. The restaurant was the first Burger King on a U.S. Air Force base.
According to the National Today website, the hamburger’s history is somewhat murky. “No one is quite sure about the origins of the hamburger, other than that it is eponymously named for the town of Hamburg in Germany,” the website says, adding that the connection seems to come from a 1758 recipe for “hamburger sausage.” Or maybe it comes from the Hamburg America Line, a cruise line that served its passengers burger-esque sandwiches in the mid-1880s.
Despite much debate among restaurants over who invented the burger, “there seems to be some consensus amongst historians that the food as we know it today truly gained popularity at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, an event that also gave us the ice-cream cone,” the website says.
Burgers were available at Exchange snack bars before 1971, but that’s a key year in Exchange burger history: As fast-food joints were flourishing outside the gates that year, the Exchange got into the fast-food game by opening the first “Run-In Chef” restaurant at Fort Leonard Wood. Run-In Chef had a 19-menu item that was the same worldwide, providing familiarity to troops no matter where they were deployed.
There was a mobile version dubbed “The Running Chef,” and the Exchange also operated locations of the more burger-specific Burger Bar worldwide, but mostly in Germany.
Like its civilian counterparts, the Run-In Chef tried to have a signature item: The AAFES Burger. It wasn’t a whopping success.
Opening day at the Exchange’s first Burger King, Aug. 3, 1984, Ansbach, Germany. About 4,000 customers were served on the first day.
Enter the Whopper. In 1984, Burger King became the Exchange’s first name-brand burger restaurant, as the Exchange awarded it a contract to open a minimum of 185 BKs. The first one opened Aug. 3, 1984, in a renovated club in Ansbach, Germany. During its first hour, it served more than 400 customers; by close of business on its first day, it had served 4,000. A thousand of those went home with souvenir T-shirts that ran out in hour two.
That year, the Exchange also opened Burger Kings in Frankfurt, Germany; Camp Casey, South Korea (in a Quonset hut); and Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Since then, the Exchange has operated Burger Kings—sometimes as mobile units—all over the world, including in Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Iraq and Kosovo. The Exchange even operates one on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, nearly 2,500 miles west of Hawaii.
Burger King dominates the Exchange burger portfolio but it has company. In early 2020, Wahlburgers, the burger chain owned by singer/actors Mark and Donnie Wahlberg and their chef brother Paul, opened its first Exchange location at the Kaiserslautern Military Community Center’s shopping center. Mark and Paul Wahlberg attended a late-2019 preview party to help launch the restaurant. A long-awaited second location is expected to open in 2022 at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Sources: Exchange Post archives, Exchange history Flickr
