One of the Kmarts at home had a lunch counter/diner (separate area walled off from the retail space, with both counter and booth seating) when I was a kid, apparently a holdover from when it used to be a Kresge’s. The lunch counter closed in the mid-to-late 80’s, but the store is still going strong. I had lunch there a time or two with my grandparents when I was little. One of our local drugstores also had a lunch counter/soda fountain (counter seating only, in the main store), and we got ice cream there a few times. That entire store is gone now.
There’s still a drug store with a lunch counter the next county over from me, but I’ve never eaten there. I’m rarely out that way at lunch time, and from what I’ve heard it’s far and away my worst possible option for food in that area. There’s also still a full-on soda fountain in the old Woolworth’s store in Asheville, NC. They’ve turned the retail space into an art gallery, but the soda fountain is still old school. Chrome and red pleather stools, parfait glasses, patty melts, phosphates, and real cane sugar soda for the floats (including Coca Cola in the little 8 oz glass bottles.)
Yep, at Woolworths in the 1970s and early 1980s when I was about 13. The counters were still there but defunct after that, until Woolworths went under in the late 1990s.
The oldest continuously open hilltop eating place in town is the surviving grill diner from a long-defunct drug store. Breakfast & lunch only. Fresh burgers, fishtail sandwiches, breaded pork tenderloins almost big as a hat… well, a small hat. There’s a restaurant pub on one side & a pizza buffet on the other, but at lunchtime, the grill is packed.
Besides the various drug-store grills/diners, we had a few department store lunch counters over the decades & I have the same nostalgia expressed here.
My grandmother used to take me shopping in downtown Flint, Michigan in the 50’s. After we cruised Smith Bridgman, Winkelman’s and the Vogue, we’d stop at Kresge’s (maybe it was Woolworth… I can’t remember) lunch counter and get a hot turkey sandwich or BLT and an apple dumpling for dessert. When I was 12, I got braces on my teeth and when we’d go to Flint once a month to have the orthodontist tighten them, we’d also shop, but I’d get soup and jello and enviously watch granny roll her eyes in delight at those hot turkey sandwiches.
We had a couple in Reston, VA in the 70s. Lakeside Pharmacy at Lake Anne had a nice one until surprisingly recently. Hunters Woods Center had a Drug Fair with a lunch counter. I worked there for a few months in 1979 and my brother had worked there about five years earlier. He showed me the hilarious trick of dropping crushed ice into the deep fryer.
About fifteen years later, at a Roy Rogers in Silver Spring, there was a fire and firetrucks and the whole staff was waiting outside for the firemen to finish. I jokingly asked “You guys didn’t drop ice in the deep fryer, did you?” The employees just looked at each other and didn’t say anything…
Yet another one to mention Woolworth’s. The last one I ate at was in Greensberg, PA, sometime in the late '70s. I’ve still got a photo of my friend Brian’s then-girlfriend (who I and whole bunch of other people had a bit of a crush on), perusing the menu.
A little further upscale, Penn Traffic, the local department store in my hometown of Johnstown, PA, had a lunch counter on the top floor that my Mom took me to a few times when I was little. My grandmother did the same when I accompanied her on a shopping trip from her home in Bethlehem to Gimbel’s in Philly. That trip was especially memorable because we took the Reading Railroad and I got to ride in the cab of the diesel railcar on the way back.
I grew up in the 70’s in suburban Pittsburgh, when they were being replaced by little booths that sold popcorn, slushies, hot dogs, and pretzels. But I remember a few:
There was one at the Kaufmans in downtown Pittsburgh that was there at least until it was sold in the 2000’s (I don’t know if the new store retained the lunch counter or not). It had pretty decent pizza and sandwiches.
There was a G C Murphy’s near my house until, I think late 80’s or early 90’s, that had a big section with about 8-10 booths and probably 15+ counter seats. They had burgers and sandwiches, and (I think) stuff like meatloaf and chicken. I mostly remember they had really good milkshakes. The last few years or so that Murphys was open they stopped the grill and just sold popcorn, pretzels, and drinks.
Going a little further back, I remember a department store in New Kensington (Gaylords?) that had a lunch counter but I don’t remember that as well, I think I was 5 or 6 the last time I was there.
it kinda explodes sending hot grease out in every direction. It would have to hit an an ignition source such as a nearby stove burner but if it caught fire it’s then an ugly grease fire.
