I love the old root beer drive ins where they would serve you an ice cold root beer in a frosty mug with burgers, hot dogs and fries. Here in Kansas City only one left - Mug’s Up.. Mugs up brews its own root beer an they still have car hops with those little metal change dispensers.
Do you have one of these in your area?
There is one in Anderson, Indiana called Gene’s root beer. It’s still popular, but the dogs, buns, and sauce aren’t as good as they used to be. A bit north of there in Alexandria is a B&K Root Beer. Both are open only in season.
I don’t live there much any more, though.
Not root beer, but mountain dew. There was a delightful little coffee shop that I would go to when possible. Then one time, after a three week hiatus, it was suddenly this Mountain Dew themed fast food place. Well actually the food was an after thought. They had about 30 flavors of soda they mixed using a friggin Mountain Dew base. Now there’s two of them.
BLECH!
Not since A&W stopped doing the mixing and making of root beer in house at each store jas there been a root beer stand that I know of around these parts
Likewise. The local A&W was in Springfield Mall.
There used to be a McDonald’s with carhop service at Leesburg Pike & Carlin Springs Road but it got turned into your standard MickeyD’s several years ago.
My local A&W shares space with Long John Silver’s, and has a drive-through but no carhop service. There’s Sonic, but I wouldn’t consider what they serve food.
I just looked it up. It used to be a Roy Rogers and that’s the place which had the carhop service.
Can you get the root beer in the frosty mugs or is it just in paper cups?
The last A&W place in my city closed years ago. I remember it as a kid, and it lasted until I was about thirty. I’m almost sixty five now.
Union city Ohio, which is about fifty miles away, has a A&W old style restaurant. It’s nice.
In my locality, you can get the mug, pay a little extra and you can keep it too.
(Even though I’m not Urbanredneck)
We had two A&W drive-ins until a few years ago, but they both closed down, and the only remaining A&W is a KFC combo that doesn’t have carhops and uses BIB for its root beer.
About an hour and a half from here, though, there’s Triple XXX Root Beer, one of the last vestiges of what was once a nationwide chain.
our original a&w drive in became a b&K and closed down a few years after that
then we had one that was a regular fast food place and the owner sold it and it moved to the mall and closed down about 4 years after that …
YUM! brands owned it and they tended to pair it with their other restaurants which is why you see it with KFC and ljs in a lot of places
but dr pepper owns the actual root beer …the restaurants are a separate company that buys the root beer from dr pepper
heres the history…it sort of follows dairy queens orgins a bit
funny thing tho my mom is the single-handed reason that the a&w’s around here charged a 2$ deposit for each mug… shed go in after partying and eat and such and forget to give the mugs back … she had about 4 dozen mugs at one point…
Same here, except it’s not local to me, it’s just the closest - about fifty miles away in the Houston suburbs. I wouldn’t count it as a “real” root beer stand, either. The ones I miss were always in small towns and served the same function as a Texas Stop Sign(aka Dairy Queen).
There used to be an small A&W near us sharing space with a KFC.
But you couldn’t get a baby/mama/papa burger there. I loved mama burgers w/sweet pickle relish.
But that was years ago. None left anywhere in the region.
Yes, Rudy’s Drive-in They even have roller-skating waitresses
Brian
None that I know of down here in N. Ali-bama, but was home (near Akron, OH) for a quick visit last weekend and ran across an old B&K that’s been in the same place for at least 30 years. A big mug of Root Beer and two cheese dogs with fries brought back a lot of good thoughts.
We have a several Stewart’s Root Beers in the area. They serve their own Root Beer in a frosty mug.
It is a lot like A&W, not quite as good, though their Root Beer floats are.
A local brewery, Levity Brewing Company, in order to make their brewery more kid-friendly, brews their own root beer. I’ve tried it and it is pretty good. They also brew their own ginger ale, which parents sometimes mistakenly purchase for their kids. They’ve added “HOT” to their signage.
I had to check your location because I didn’t think you were from Indiana. The only other XXX is in Lafayette IN about an hour from me. Very popular with Purdue students and alums.
Years ago I visited Canada and I noticed the A&W’s were bigger restaurants there.