Red Top: 'one's a meal'.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: ON SMALL BIZ - Company overview

Conway's Red Top family restaurant of Colorado Springs boasts arguably the state's biggest hamburger--and the leanest slogan:

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"One's a Meal."

The late Norbert Conway coined the phrase in the 1960s to trumpet a burger so big it requires a 6 1/2-inch bun, and tasty enough that it once was named among the "Five Best Hamburgers in America" by the nationally syndicated column "Taste of the Nation."

The offspring of Iowa farmers, Conway first came to the Colorado Springs area intending to mine gold at Cripple Creek. But by that time he already had four children--he would eventually have 10--and the gold apparently was not all that plentiful So Conway wound up taking a job as a dishwasher at a burger joint called Red Top. In 1962, he and his wile, Phyllis, bought the place from Lou Marold and affixed the name "Conway" to the front of it.

I bring up Conway's Red Top here because, despite its prominence in Colorado burger lore, I only briefly mention the restaurant in a story you'll find in this issue that deals with competition in the fast-food burger arena.

The scant mention is no knock on Conway's Red Top. I had simply decided in advance not to include restaurants that serve beer, figuring that would open the subject-matter floodgates to hundreds of pubs serving signature burgers along with their brews.

Red Top only added beer to its menu about 10 years ago, largely to better serve the adult softball crowd and their ilk.

"People like to have a beer with their burger," says Kidwin Qualey, the first of Norbert's 38 grandchildren and one of six Conway descendants still working at Red Top. "We get a lot of teams that come in, in the spring and the summer."

Red Top originally opened in 1944, making it 11 years older than McDonald's, and nine years older than the venerable Denver institution touting burgers with 6-inch buns, Grandpa's Burger Haven ("No. I on the Big Bun") on South Federal Boulevard.

Red Top now has five locations in Colorado Springs and a sixth in Pueblo.

It's worth noting that Red Top and California-based In-N-Out Burger are about the only restaurants praised in Eric Schlosser's otherwise scathing burger manifesto, "Fast Food Nation."

Like most Conway offspring, Qualey, 45, grew up working at the restaurant--in her case starting at age 9 around 1969 as an "ice girl," filling cups with ice that her grandparents would fill with beverages and take outside to customers.

She now works at the corporate office of Red...