McDonald's

• Address: 1353 Parkway East, Gatlinburg, TN 37738 (the Parkway East stretch, listed near Bruce Road).
• Phone: 865-436-4006
• Hours (per a store listing, fall 2026): Sunday through Thursday 5:30 AM to 11 PM; Friday and Saturday 5:30 AM to midnight. The drive-thru follows the same hours.
• Holidays: Listings show reduced hours on Christmas Eve and regular hours on Easter, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Call the store before you count on it.

Gatlinburg's main downtown strip is packed with sit-down restaurants, pancake houses and candy shops, and most of them do not open until 7 or 8 in the morning. If you are chasing sunrise at an overlook, a pre-dawn hike or an early slot at Cades Cove, this is one of the few places in town that is already lit up.

A few ways visitors use it:

• Breakfast to go. Order at the drive-thru, then head up Newfound Gap Road. The park entrance is free, but any vehicle parked longer than 15 minutes needs a parking tag ($5 daily, $15 weekly, $40 annual, with federal passes not accepted), so buy one at a visitor center or a payment machine before you leave the lot.
• Late-night fallback. After a long day on the Parkway, when the sit-down places have closed, the Friday and Saturday midnight closing makes it a handy last call for hungry teenagers.
• Budget meal for a big family. Gatlinburg is not cheap in peak season. A fast-food run can stretch a vacation budget for a group of six.

Traffic on the Parkway, US-441 and US-321 in the Gatlinburg area, can back up badly on fall weekends and during holiday events. The east end of the Parkway is generally calmer than downtown, but check the drive time before you commit if you are trying to catch a trailhead at a specific hour. For the National Park, the nearest main gateway is the Sugarlands Visitor Center area on the Gatlinburg side. If you want to leave the car for the evening, the free Gatlinburg trolley (see the city's trolley page) runs through downtown, though this restaurant is outside the walkable core.

If you are looking for something with local character, there are plenty of better meals in town. But for coffee, hash browns and a breakfast sandwich before sunrise, it does the job without fuss.