The McDonald's restaurant in Des Plaines became Ray Kroc's first franchise location in 1955.
Kroc opened the restaurant at 400 North Lee Street in Des Plaines, Illinois, on April 15, 1955. It operated as the ninth McDonald's restaurant overall and served as a model for the standardized system Kroc wanted to develop. The building’s design used the recognizable arches and a highly visible roadside format.
This location is often confused with the McDonald brothers’ first restaurant in San Bernardino, California, which opened in 1940, and with McDonald's corporate headquarters in nearby Oak Brook. The Des Plaines site is important to branding history because it helped turn the McDonald brothers’ restaurant methods into a repeatable national franchise identity. A reconstruction of the restaurant has been preserved as a museum.