I have a certain fondness for the brand's design consciousness, evoloving a style to a fairly sophisticated and immediately identifiable restaurant with Georgian Revival detailing under a bold orange roof, its typography (that wonderful flourish on the squared H, the rounded bottom of the W, the lightning-bolt S in neon, or the spaced apartment letters in the old Times Square restaurant sign), the early use of silhouette forms that echoed an interest in early American silhouette portraits.
Even hired Sister Parish designed a Howard Johnson restaurant:
[quote]Johnson’s success gave him added opportunity to capitalize on getting his name around. When wealthy socialite Dorothy May Kinnicutt Parish (known as Sister Parish) began her decorating business in the 1930s, Johnson hired her to decorate the restaurant he built in Somerville, New Jersey. She told a reporter from The New York Times, “I dressed the waitresses in aqua, did the walls in aqua, I made the placemats in aqua. I guess I must have thought it was quite chic, but I haven’t done a thing in aqua since.” (quoted in A History of Howard Johnson’s by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco).
It held up to variations of georgraphy and time, to mod-ish 1960s A-frame roofs and curciform double A-frame roofs. The menus, the uniforms, the architectural progression all had a look that made it recognizable even as it changed, at least sometime in the 1970s when the brand fallen and its ambitions became dumbed down and cheap, no real effort given to the matter as the company floundered, wondering if it were this thing or that.
Personally it was a lesson in my father's view that sometimes, when everything was unfamiliar and nothing was inviting, you just wanted a sure thing that you knew. It was a restaurant for when my parents road trips when they couldn't settle on a local place that looked sufficiently interesting. In college it was a late night post-weed destination: ice cream sundaes, fried clams, onion rings...
Of course I've not been in one for at least a third of a century, which shows that nostalgia for neon fonts "pie man" silhouettes and even Mad Man Don Draper go just so far. I was surprised that anything still linked to the brand was still in operation, though you do see the rare leftover restaurant, refaced and repainted, and renamed, and still recognizable in an instant as one of Howard Johnson's.
