The Only Place In The US Where Burger King Can't Legally Use Its Own Name

Burger King is a fast food giant. It operates nearly 20,000 stores, with a footprint spread across over 100 countries, where an incredible 11 million customers walk through one of its doors each day. Within the U.S., they have over 6,500 outlets across 51 states and territories. But, despite this dominating presence, there's one tiny American town where you won't find the iconic Whopper: Mattoon, Illinois, where Burger King can't legally use its name.

Back to the 1950s, a Mattoon-based couple Gene and Betty Hoots acquired a successful ice-cream business called the Frigid Queen, and decided to add a burger-and-fries outlet to their home-spun operation. Run out of a garage behind the ice cream shop, they called it Burger King, and even applied for a statewide patent on the name. This was granted to them two years after opening, in 1959.

In another origin story running in parallel, James McLamore and Dave Edgarton opened a restaurant in Miami called Insta-Burger-King. More ambitious than the Hoots, they incorporated as Burger King Corporation in 1957 and began their journey towards world domination. However, this journey hit a speed bump when they arrived in Mattoon, Illinois, where The Original Burger King still stands as the only Burger King within a 20-mile radius. 

By the time Gene and Betty Hoots petitioned to the court that they had trademarked the name in the state of Illinois, the Burger King Corporation already had 50 outlets in the state. Its roster of lawyers argued that it held the trademark across America, and the court ruled in the corporation's favor, effectively allowing it to use the Burger King name in Illinois. But the court did grant Gene and Betty Hoots a small reprieve: They blocked the Burger King Corporation from opening a store within a 20-mile radius of Mattoon without the couple's permission. 

"We never fully understood what happened in that courtroom," said Gene Hoots in a 2003 feature in the Illinois Times. Betty said the corporation once offered them $10,000 for permission to open a Burger King in Mattoon, but they politely asked them to "get lost." So, while Burger King can open locations in some of the most unique locations around the world, there will never be one in Mattoon, Illinois. Meanwhile, it settled for two locations right outside the 20-mile no-go radius: one 22 miles north of town, and another 25 miles south.

Incidentally, Mattoon isn't the only place where the fast food giant has faced this problem — it's basically the reason why Burger King is called Hungry Jack's in Australia. There are 400-plus Hungry Jack's that dot the Aussie landscape, sharing the same design aesthetic and menu as the tens of thousands of Burger Kings across the world — including the Whopper, which has a historic origin story of its own.