McDonald’s first drive-in restaurant, opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1940, was called McDonald’s Bar-B-Q.
The brothers opened the restaurant in San Bernardino, California, serving a broad barbecue-oriented menu to customers at drive-in service stalls. Its original identity was therefore tied more closely to barbecue than to the hamburger-focused brand that followed.
In 1948, the brothers temporarily closed the restaurant and reopened it with a faster, simplified self-service system. That redesign shifted the business toward hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes and led to a different name, McDonald’s Famous Hamburgers. This change is sometimes confused with the restaurant’s original 1940 name.
The later Speedee branding and the golden arches developed after this early period. The 1940 restaurant was the starting point for the operational and visual changes that eventually shaped the modern McDonald’s identity.