The Unique Kansas Restaurant That Delivers Food By An Overhead Train

Although restaurants have largely bounced back from the pandemic, there are some concerns about the ways the dining experience has been diminished, whether by an increased focus on takeout and delivery or by the increasing loudness of dining rooms across America. This may be a cause for some hand-wringing and soul-searching on the part of restaurateurs, so they would do well to listen to our suggestions. Chief among them: Have you considered having diners' meals delivered to their table via choo choo train? We can't think of a single restaurant which wouldn't be vastly improved by the addition of train delivery, up to and including expensive, Michelin-starred eateries. (If "The Bear" had train delivery, the show would just be about a bunch of well-adjusted people having a great time.) In short: be more like Fritz's Railroad Restaurant of Kansas City, Kansas.

Fritz's menu consists of typical American food, such as hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken sandwiches. Their specialty is hamburgers served with grilled onions, not unlike the onion burgers of nearby Oklahoma. But it's the delivery system that really makes the restaurant notable: Each dish is loaded into a train which runs overhead on a special track, lowering the meal down to the person who ordered it. As you can imagine, the kids love it, but it can be appreciated by just about anyone with an appreciation for engineering and/or a good old-fashioned train.

Fritz's Railroad Restaurant was founded in 1954 by Fritz Kropf, a veteran of World War II whose father ran a restaurant called John's Place since the 1920s. At first, Fritz's was a fairly typical drive-in, the kind we all associate with the 1950s, thanks to movies like "American Graffiti." But Fritz, ever the tinkerer, developed a system that could deliver meals to patrons automatically, which he installed in the early 1970s. Although it was originally called the "Skat Kat," diners kept referring to the delivery system as a "train" — which Fritz resisted at first before leaning into it.

Today, the railroad theming is all over the place, from the railroad crossing signs to the jaunty engineer cap on the wolf mascot. The restaurant, which now has three locations, remains in the Kropf family, even after Fritz and his wife, Virginia, passed away in 2004 and 2018, respectively. It remains a delight to find unique restaurants in different corners of the country, and Fritz's is one of the most delightful of them all. All aboard!