Update: Faux Burger King Resurrected As Actual Burger King

This is how the BK sign looked hours after local media began inquiring about the restaurant’s authenticity.

A quick update to last week’s story about the Pittsburgh fast food joint with the Burger King sign, Burger King menu, Burger King uniforms, but not Burger King food. It is apparently set to rise from the ashes and be reborn as… an honest-to-goodness BK.

The restaurant had stood as a legitimate Burger King for quite some time, with a number of Consumerist readers telling us they had popped into this location for the occasional Whopper over the years.

Then a couple weeks back, customers started noticing that the food wasn’t quite what it was supposed to be. To-go orders came in plain brown paper bags; fries in unbranded paper cups; sodas in white polystyrene cups. Either Burger King was trying to rebrand itself by going all-generic or something fishy was up.

A curious news team from WPXI-TV was first shooed off the property when they tried to get to the bottom of the story, but were then told by a manager that the restaurant was “in transition” to becoming an independent fast food operation, in spite of the fact that everything still read “Burger King” to customers.

Within a few hours, the outdoor sign was removed and the city’s health officials said the business would be at least temporarily shut down while it looked into the name-change matter.

Then yesterday, a Pittsburgh-area BK franchisee announced that his company, which runs nearly 60 Burger Kings in the region, had taken ownership of this location, returning a proper BK to the people of Pittsburgh’s South Side.

“We have cleaned the restaurant from top to bottom,” said the new owner, who also declared that the eatery would go through a redesign in the months to come.

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by Chris Morran via Consumerist