The Weird Connection Between Kelsey’s Restaurant, Kelsey Grammer and Cheers
June 25th, 2008, 12 Comments »
Last week I had a very forgettable meal at Kelsey’s (Caution! Cheers theme music ahead!), a restaurant at the Calgary airport. It’s apparently a chain of restaurants with over 100 locations in Western and Central Canada.
The entire place has this weird, indirect connection to the TV show Cheers. The Kelsey’s logo is similar to the Cheers branding. The restaurant is apparently named after Kelsey Grammer, the actor who played the stuffy Frasier Crane. And the interior of the restaurant was all brass taps and wood panelling, with the walls were covered in cheesy 8 x 10 photos of celebrities (notably, there were no photos of the cast of Cheers). Plus, of course, when you visit the website, it plays the theme song from Cheers.
Here’s what’s weird: I can’t find any direction connection between the restaurant chain and Kelsey Grammer or Cheers. It’s like they manufactured a Cheers-like franchise brand without ever actually acknowledging what they were doing. Does anybody know the back story of this chain?
UPDATE: Hurray for crowd-sourcing. We have more information. As Jason writes in the comments below, he emailed Kelsey’s to enquire about the origin of the name:
Paul Jeffery was the founder of Kelsey’s Restaurants International Inc. and the first restaurant opened in Oakville Ontario, in 1978. Currently we have 125 stores across Canada and 1 in the US in New York. The name Kelsey’s comes from the fact that our founder Paul Jeffery and his brother frequented a roadhouse on Kelsey Rd in Barrington, Illinois while traveling in the U.S.A - hence the name Kelsey’s.
Andrea writes with links to several trademark filings for Kelsey’s. The most germane one is from 1993, where they seemed to adopt a logo similar to the Cheers brand. Andrea points out that 1993 is also the year that Cheers ended and Frasier began.
