“Fast food” and “chain” are almost synonymous. There are little independent ice cream and burger and hot dog stands and shacks and counters, but a full-blown fast food restaurant is pretty much always a chain (or franchise).

Like this one:

Well, as you can probably guess, while this began life as a fast food chain—a Long John Silver’s—it is not any more. It is still, however, a fast food restaurant!

Spelunker’s, in Front Royal, Virginia, is a one-location fast food restaurant opened by a couple in 2002 and owned by the father of the husband. It does a large amount of business via its drive-thru, but unlike most places like that, it makes fresh burgers and fries. Look at this news story from August:

“Then COVID came and my father put a pause on the project,” Steve Antonelli said. “After the initial slowdown of all businesses, we went to 100% drive-through.”

That switch — along with the restaurant’s reputation for offering freshly prepared food — brought it to the attention of The Washington Post, which featured Spelunker’s in an April 2020 article that encouraged readers to make the trek from the city to the drive-through.

“It was nuts — absolutely nuts,” Steve Antonelli recalled. “We went from doing let’s say 30 cars an hour in the drive-through to 120-150 orders an hour during COVID. We weren't really ready for it.”

Noting that Spelunker’s is the only business they have run, the Antonellis say they’ve been “kind of innovating, improving, and figuring it out” since the restaurant first opened.

“This has been our lab to figure out recipes and methods. We change. We adapt. We’re not part of a corporation where I can’t do anything. I can do whatever I want. If I want to try something different, I do. And, trust me, some of those ideas did not work,” Steve Antonelli said.

Here are where the French fries come from:

It’s such an interesting thing to have a “real” restaurant with basically from-scratch food in a fast food format.

In addition to the burgers, there’s frozen custard, with special daily flavors.

For about $15, I had a large cup of frozen custard and a double cheeseburger with meat ground in-house and cooked to order. Yes, it’s good. Very good.

I first had one of these burgers, actually, during the pandemic, in the summer of 2020 when we visited the Skyline Caverns and then sat outside with our food. It’s one of the few American/fast/bar-and-grill type meals I can remember and still go back for once in awhile.

That’s why it’s called Spelunker’s, which wouldn’t make much sense if not for it being a few minutes from a cavern that serves as probably Front Royal’s biggest tourist attraction.

I always joke that these guys should become a statewide chain, and open one location near every cavern in Virginia. Luray Caverns, Endless Caverns, Shenandoah Caverns; go from the non-chain fast food restaurant to the eat-here-after-any-visit-to-a-cave restaurant. “If there’s a cavern, there’s a Spelunker’s!”

But that sort of thing is often what sinks a restaurant’s quality. And there’s something nice—refreshing, almost—about a thing only being available in one particular place. And there’s something satisfying about making that secular pilgrimage once in awhile.

Related Reading:

Cultivating Contentment

Don’t Patch The Hole In The Wall

The Pizza Oven In Our Minds

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