Whatta-Success: Feltner’s Whatta-Burger in Russellville Is Four Generations Strong

For many travelers, Whatta-Burger has become synonymous with the Russellville exit off Interstate-40. In the River Valley, it’s hard to find a bowling, softball or baseball league that doesn’t have a Whatta-Burger-sponsored team. Countless professionals in central Arkansas worked their first job flipping burgers or writing orders on paper sacks wearing the signature yellow and green uniform.

Thanksgiving day 46 years ago, Robert Feltner opened his second hamburger joint in Russellville, Arkansas: Feltner’s Whatta-Burger. Earlier this year, the fourth generation of the Feltner-Ellis family began working at the family-owned restaurant.

“I was Daddy’s girl,” said Missy Ellis, current owner and daughter of Juanita and Robert Feltner. “There wasn’t any way I was gonna leave.”

Ellis started working in burger joints with her parents when she was 10 years old. Her first experience in a restaurant was in an establishment her father managed in Florida, where she learned to make root beer and work the fry basket. After that, she worked at her father’s first restaurant that he owned, a short-lived place called Wonderburger in Russellville. When her father opened Feltner’s Whatta-Burger, Ellis and her brother and sister continued to help out.

“When we started, we didn’t have cash registers, we had cash drawers,” said Ellis. “Mom didn’t even write down the orders, she just knew them. If you came more than once, she probably knew what you wanted when you got there. Even now, we don’t let the cash registers tell the cashier what the change should be. We make the cashier count it back.”

Her siblings eventually moved on to open businesses of their own. Ellis married her husband Randy in 1972, and he began working at Whatta-Burger in 1973. The couple took over in the mid-1990s, when Feltner wanted to retire. Feltner died in 1997, leaving the restaurant legacy to Ellis and family.

“Randy was the only boy I ever dated that Dad liked,” Ellis said. “Eventually, he was one of the only people Dad trusted. In a lot of ways, they are very much alike.”

The Feltner family roots are literally on display on the walls. The building is actually decorated from top to bottom with signs, photos and antique fishing lures the Feltners collected when they traveled after they retired.

“Every time the UPS truck would pull up, we’d know Dad found something else. Then we’d have to find wall space somewhere to put it up because he expected to see it when he returned,” Ellis said. “I just can’t get rid of any of Dad’s stuff.”

Feltner told his daughter that he didn’t have a lot of money as a kid. He promised himself if he ever made money in business, he would give as much as he could to others because he remembered how it felt to do without.

From the A-frame building on Arkansas Avenue, the Whatta-family, as they call themselves has given quite a bit. Every year, Christmas gifts are purchased for families who don’t have money for them. They have been known to provide meals for volunteer fire fighters during big deployments. They sponsor just about every sports league in the area in some way.

Ellis said when her dad died, there was still a stack of bounced checks people had written the restaurant. If they were under a certain amount, he wouldn’t pursue them, “He said, ‘They must have just been hungry. I won’t fault them for that.’”

For many years, former students at Arkansas Tech University would come in with small wooden ice cream spoons with amounts written on them to settle their accounts. When the students couldn’t pay, Feltner would write down what they owed and let them pay when they could. Almost all of them paid their debts in full.

“Dad said you have to buy good product to make good product, so we’ve always tried to be careful about vendors so our food is good,” said Ellis. “But I think the business has been such a big success because of the way Dad treated people. He treated everyone like family.”

Ellis credits the “Feltner way” of doing things with the iconic status it has attained.

“We had a guy named Benny who worked here years ago. Benny was late a lot. We had to call him. He’d show up unshaven. That’s against the rules. But we kept on because we knew if we could just get him going, he’d be great. A few years ago, Benny wrote us a letter thanking us for all we’d taught him and not giving up on him. He now runs one of the largest restaurants in Disney World.”

The Feltner way was included in the education of the Ellis kids. Carey and Jamey began working in the restaurant when they were each 14 years old. “I think they appreciated things more because they had to work for them,” she said.

Carey has become a nurse practitioner. Jamey works for Bates Distributing, a restaurant vendor. Jamey’s oldest child, Rance, began his Whatta-Burger career a few months ago.

“Randy and I are simple people,” Ellis said. “We just go with the flow and take things as they come. We don’t know what the future holds for the business.”

Whatever the future has in store for Whatta-Burger, Ellis has a clear metric for success, “I always just wanted to make my dad proud when he was alive. I still want to make him proud now that he’s gone.”