Bill Gray's

In the spring of 1938 a young family man, working at Eastman Kodak Company for 17 cents an hour, decided he needed to supplement his income in order to support his family. He accomplished this by working weekends selling hot dogs and soda pop out of a small road side stand near his home in Webster, New York. That young man's name was Bill Gray. Bill and his wife Alberta worked as many as eighteen hours per day on the weekends to maintain their fledgling business. Four years later, making more money on the weekends than he did at his full time job at Kodak, Bill decided to go into the restaurant business full time. This is the story of how the Bill Gray's Restaurants got its start.

In 1965, Bill Gray and Bruce Hegedorn joined forces and formed a partnership and a corporation called Bill Gray's Incorporated, and opened a brand new Bill Gray's Restaurant on Route 104 in Ontario. That same year Bill opened a second location on Culver Road in Sea Breeze. For the next twelve years Bill, Alberta, and several members of the family worked to make Bill Gray's one of the most popular restaurants in the Rochester area by using the same commitment to quality and customer service that Bill Gray's established in 1938.

With popularity and success came expansion. In 1978, Bill Gray's opened its third location on Hard Road in Webster, only a few hundred yards from the original Bill Gray's location. Over the next forty-plus years Bill Gray's added (and sometimes subtracted) locations to where it currently operates 16 locations in the Rochester and Buffalo areas.