Red Hot And Green
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #266
Take a look at this bank outside downtown Leesburg, Virginia:
It doesn’t really look like a bank, does it?
Now I happen to have driven by here many times before it became a Chase bank, so I remember what it was. It was this barbecue restaurant called Red Hot & Blue:
To try and figure out what it might have been before that, I went down the Red Hot & Blue rabbit hole in the newspapers.com archive. The idea is that you can maybe find an article about the transition to Red Hot & Blue from the previous tenant, or at least a reference to the previous tenant, which lets you build a paper trail back to when the building was first built.
I wasn’t able to do that, because there don’t seem to be any Leesburg-area papers from the relevant timeframe. I did, however, find this 1994 review of the Manassas location of Red Hot & Blue, which notes that at this time there were 16 of them, (most in the D.C. area where the company was founded), and, more interesting than that, that the chain was founded by Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who is famous for his commentary on the Southern Strategy.
There are only three Red Hot & Blue locations left today. The official website includes a slightly different founding story, in which Atwater became a partner after a few other folks opened the first location.
A Google search for the building’s address gave me a new lead: this editorial photo of a car show from 1998, on a stock photo website, showing the building, then, as America’s Best Diner:
In turn, you can now search for “America’s Best Diner,” which, initially, didn’t yield anything further. (I’m going to come back to it, though.)
What I did next was just Google search “America’s Best Diner Leesburg” and “Red Hot & Blue Leesburg,” to see if I could find some parenthetical comment or something that would reveal an older tenant (I wasn’t sure there was one—I wasn’t able to find the building’s construction date—but I kind of figured there was).
And here we are: a reader comment on a 2022 local news item about the closure of Red Hot & Blue says: “This spot originally opened as a Bob’s Big Boy, and then became a Shoney’s later on…can still remember that as Bob’s they had a breakfast buffet that was pretty good! it’s been RH&B for at least 15-20 years I think.”
A comment on a recent reminiscing Reddit thread about Leesburg backs this up: “Peebles is now an Office Depot, K-Mart became a Party City but that closed, and Bob’s Big Boy was Red, Hot, and Blue BBQ for years, but it’s now a bank.”
And a 2008 review from a local blogger also confirms this chain of tenants:
An interesting thing about this location is the history of restaurants that have come and gone before. When we first moved to Leesburg in the late 1980’s, it was a Bob’s Big Boy and a great place to eat. A few years later it closed, and a Shoney's opened up there, and was not as good as Bob’s. A few years later, it too closed, and was replaced by America’s Best Diner. It was an attempt at a 1950’s-style hamburger place, but we called it America’s Worst Diner. And that brings us back to the present: Red Hot & Blue.
Shoney’s. That was interesting to me. I suppose the building does look a bit like a stock Shoney’s—like a building that was altered to try and look like the chain’s standard building from back then.
A search for “Shoney’s Leesburg” turned up little, but it turned up enough: this 2026 profile of Virginia restaurant owner Warren Thompson, who owns 65 D.C.-area restaurants! His company started like this:
When Warren Thompson was 12 years old, he decided he was going into the restaurant business.
He was sitting in a Shoney’s with his parents in Portsmouth.
“I saw people coming in, families coming in, having fun, paying their money and leaving. And I said, that’s a great way to make a living,” he recalled.
From that point on, everything was focused on how he could prepare himself to operate and run a restaurant company.
Fast forward to 1992 and Warren was in Leesburg opening a Shoney’s of his own, converting a former Big Boy’s on East Market Street—one of 31 he bought from Marriott. It wasn’t a great time to be a Shoney’s franchisee, and the brand faltered and over the next decade he had to sell them off.
(A little aside here on Marriott: at some point Shoney’s and Big Boy were associated companies; both were Marriott holdings for a time, as was, for a time, the Howard Johnsons restaurant division. And Hot Shoppes. In fact, there was an entire Marriott restaurant division—kind of—which no longer exists, which feels like another down-the-rabbit-hole business story.)
But I said I’d return to America’s Best Diner. I found another article about Warren Thompson’s restaurant business, a much older one from 1998 in the Washington Post. It recounts his purchase of the Big Boy restaurants and the conversions into Shoney’s, as well as troubles the Shoney’s brand was facing in the 1990s. But it also adds this:
Although the food service division is experiencing the stronger growth, Thompson still believes in restaurants. Over the past two years he has developed his own casual dining concepts, including three America’s Best Diners and two T.J.’s Roadhouse Grill & Saloons. The remaining 15 restaurants are Shoney’s.
In other words, America’s Best Diner was Thompson’s own concept, which he used to rebrand the Leesburg Shoney’s, which he originally purchased as a Big Boy.
The restaurant business is interesting, and the way chains and franchises and IPs spread is often quirky and difficult to trace. (For example, it’s possible, though I can’t confirm it, that Thompson still owned the property during its tenure as Red Hot & Blue, which the internet seems to think sold franchises at one time.
A lot of the time, a restaurant “going out of business” is really rebranding under the same ownership, while conversely a lot of longtime restaurants have gone through multiple owners.
There are stories everywhere.
Related Reading:
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