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If you're hungry for a Lums steamed hotdog, a Gino Giant burger drenched in sauce or some Chi-Chi's nachos, well, that's too bad. Those restaurant chains no longer exist.

The restaurant trade is relentlessly, mercilessly Darwinian. Just as the sabre-toothed tigers and mastodons roamed the land eons ago, there was a more recent time when American roadsides were dotted with orange-roofed Howard Johnson's restaurants and their promise of 27 different ice cream flavors. Here are 10 restaurant chains that are either outright defunct, or -- as in the case of Howard Johnson's --have shrunk to just a few remaining locations.

• Gino's: At it's peak, the chain grew to 330 outlets in 1972. A decade later, Marriott bought the chain for $48.6 million and merged it into Roy Rogers.
• Sambo's: When the chain reached its apex in the early 1980s, it had 1,117 restaurants. By then, though, Sambo's was already starting to falter financially. Worse yet, its name became a lightning rod for anti-discrimination protesters. As the chain gradually collapsed in the 1980s, many of its locations became Denny's.
• White Tower: A White Castle wannabe they even copied their "Buy 'em by the sack" advertising slogan, with "Take Home a Bagful." White Tower grew to 230 restaurants at its peak in the 1950s, but then gradually faded away, as customers moved away from its locations in declining urban areas. The last surviving White Tower franchise in Toledo shut down in 2004.

Full list at HowStuffWorks.com.

Total aggregation of HowStuffWorks.com.

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