McDonald's original restaurant business was called McDonald's Bar-B-Q.
Richard and Maurice McDonald opened their first restaurant in San Bernardino, California, in 1940. It began as a drive-in barbecue restaurant, offering a broader menu and table service before the brothers reorganized the business around a faster, more limited operation.
In 1948, the McDonalds closed the restaurant temporarily and reopened it with the Speedee Service System. The streamlined format emphasized hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, milkshakes, and rapid counter service. That change created the operating model later expanded through franchising.
The business name is often remembered only through the later McDonald's hamburger chain, so the barbecue origin is easy to overlook. The early name also predates the Golden Arches-centered visual identity that became central to the brand in the 1950s and 1960s.