Unique places have stories...
For 62 years, locals have been coming to The Root Beer Stand to get their summertime treats. Open six months of the year—mid-March through September—the restaurant serves more than 100 gallons of root beer and more than 500 hotdogs on a typical summer day. Add those numbers up, and one can estimate that The Root Beer Stand has sold more than one million gallons of root beer and five million hotdogs in its lifetime.
What's with all the hats?
This tradition started back in the ‘60s and ‘70s when The Root Beer Stand was situated on the main thoroughfare from Cincinnati to Dayton.A truck driver left his hat on the counter, so the owner hung it up in the doorway so that next time the driver came by, he’d remember to retrieve it.
A few days later, a driver from a competitor’s company came into the restaurant and insisted that if the restaurant was going to hang up the competitor’s hat, they must hang up his as well.
From then on, every time someone left a hat at the restaurant, it would be added to the ceiling. The hats represent individuals from different parts of the country, different walks of life, and different affiliations. But they all came to this restaurant because of their love for simple food.
Why is it called "Timmy Dog"?
Some customers come so frequently that they have menu items named after them.
In the mid-90s, a customer named Timmy, who worked at the local General Electric aviation plant, came to The Root Beer Stand every day during his lunch break and said the same thing: “I’ll take a hotdog with everything on it. Everything you’ve got back there in the kitchen, throw it on there!”
Burroughs' mother-in-law, Jackie, joked with Timmy that the next year they’d put the hotdog on the menu and name it after him. Thinking the “everything hotdog” would be nothing more than an inside joke, Jackie put the Timmy Dog on the menu. Much to everyone’s surprise—including Timmy’s—it was a resounding success.
“It’s got relish, kraut, mustard, ketchup, onions, hot sauce, chili, cheese, everything on it,” says Burroughs. “It almost weighs like a burrito.”The
Timmy Dog is still just as popular today. Timmy (pictured to the right with the staff in 2026) himself retired and moved to Florida, but he still comes in every summer to visit and get the famous dog with his namesake.
