I really dont remember them. The TV show “Happy Days” was for the first season centered around one. The ones I know of are similar to say a Sonic.
So what were they like?
Was the food good?
Were the carhops pretty girls on roller skates?
Were you really served on real plates and real glasswear and metal utensils?
It would depend on the area. The carhops on skates seems a southern California thing. We had drive-in restaurants in our area, but the waitresses didn’t skate.
For the food, it was better than average compared to fast food today. The usual burgers, fries, and shakes. You’d drive in and they’d take your order, then bring it out on a tray that hooked onto your window.
Not sure, but I think the plates and cups were paper. No utensils were needed.
The food was fast food, quality varied.
The carhops were pretty girls to my young eyes, but only went to a place once where some of them were on roller skates. You probably need a nice flat smooth parking lot to do that.
Real plates and plastic stuff sometimes, mostly stuff wrapped in paper and cardboard. Don’t recall any real glasses, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Plastic forks and spoons is all I remember.
There were drive-in restaurants around my stomping grounds ca. 1960’s, in the St. Louis area. Notably Parkmoor, Steak 'N Shake, and Schneidhorst’s. Both were major hangouts for teens, but none had roller skates on their carhops. Good food (so we thought); more expensive than McDonald’s (but McDonald’s & Burger King didn’t exist, making comparison a problem).
Memory isn’t perfect, but I don’t remember ceramic plates, glassware, or metal utensils, just paper & plastic.
The main attraction was you didn’t have to go inside and occupy a table (although most had optional indoor areas), so there was a different, looser attitude and faster service than in a sitdown establishment.
The whole idea works much better in Southern California’s endless summer. Not so much in Missouri winters, but we got by.
There is still an A&W root beer stand near me. If you are lucky someone will come out to your car if you blink your lights. No skates. There’s a Sonic down the road from them, have to try it out.
Just remembered, the local place we went most often had a display with the menu and a speaker to order. I was pretty young the last time we went, the place got torn down and something else built there, probably no later than 1965.
IIRC, A&W root beer was brought to the car in glass mugs.
The ones we had in New Jersey were Stewarts and A&W. They served hot dogs, french fries, and mugs of root beer. No hamburgers.
None of them had servers in roller skates – the first time I heard anything about that was in American Graffiti. It definitely sounds like a California thing. Roller skates wouldn’t have worked at the stands I was familiar with – the parking lots weren’t paved, but were covered in sand, pebbles, and random patches of grass. Any but the best roller skaters would’ve skidded to an abrupt stop and spilled their trays.
The tray was the key to the whole thing – it hooked onto your door (or, more often, your partially rolled-down window). The root beer came in substantial glass mugs. The mugs were a bit deceptive – they had hollow bases and thick walls, so you were actually getting less root beer than you thought. But it was better than a paper cup, by far. It was the only thing they had to wash – the hot dogs and fries were in paper "boats’.
Most of them are gone, now. The ones that remain are paved, but still no roller-skating servers.
We used to go to the Parkette Drive-In in Lexington, Kentucky for a snack on Kentucky Derby Day, munching fairly good drive-in food (and semi-exotic stuff like oyster po-boys) while listening to the Derby broadcast on the radio.
Went back recently and sadly the oyster po-boys are no more, and the rest of the food while OK is nothing special.
My recollection of A&Ws andDog ‘n’ Suds is that they were somewhere between fast food and low-end casual dining (e.g., Big Boy restaurants) in quality. At the A&Ws in Wisconsin, at least, if you chose to not eat in your car, you had table service, but it was pretty much just a fast-food menu (burgers, hot dogs, fried shrimp, fried chicken, French fries, etc.). At both chains, as CalMeacham notes, you got the root beer in hefty glass mugs.
What I suspect makes them “good,” in retrospect, was the novelty of eating in your car in an era before the drive-thru window, and nostalgia.
I think A&W Root Beer places may have been the exception, since frosty glass mugs were their trademark. No such places existed in my local hometown teen youth, but other territories had them. Otherwise, drinks came in paper or plastic. Much food was in paper wraps, sacks, or plastic baskets with paper liners, sort of a hybrid concept. The baskets could be reused, the paper was thrown away. Some of that is still used today.
Most were really awesome. Some had good indoor seating and survived after the drive-ins died off but too many of the smaller single places ones didn’t.
It varied from place to place but even the not-as-good places tended to be better than fast food today. And almost every place had some sort of actual food in addition to the standard burgers and shakes.
Some places but others they were on foot.
It varied. Some places did actual plates but the basket or box was more common. Cups were almost always plastic or sometimes tin/metal. Icecream was usually in/on glass with the long metal spoons.
My hometown still has a drive-in that’s been in business since circa 1960. I went there for lunch the last time I was in the area, and I would say the food was better than the average fast food burger, but nothing to write home about. I do suspect that by this point the main draw is nostalgia.
It was practically a requirement in my family to work in the food service industry while in high school. And some would work at various places. So we got familiar with a range of places.
For “local” places the quality varied a lot. Most were okay to “at least it won’t kill you”. But a few were really great. Hint: if you’re getting 5 burgers for a buck you weren’t getting haute cuisine.
The chains that were starting to really break out back then were better than most of those local places. Ergo why they prospered. At least okay food in general. But the top dog was A&W. Mama, Papa and Baby burgers was a nice range. I preferred the Mama. The root beer in those mugs was great. Plug you could get a gallon jug of it from the fountain to take home. Better than the bottled stuff.
We did get car hop service at one in the late 90s. The kids thought that was a riot.
(I went to an A&W while on a trip recently. One of those overworked joints with KFC things. Way to screw things up “A Great American Brand LLC”. With a name like that, you know it’s crap. Although Yum! did most of the damage to the brand.)
We had an A&W drive-in in my hometown, in southern Michigan, in the early '60s. As I recall, the parking was paved, but rough and uneven. No skates. No indoor tables – you either drove in and parked for the car-hop service or walked up to the window to order. The service was as CalMeacham described – the tray hooked onto the driver’s window, the root beer came in heavy glass mugs like these (four or five different sizes), and everything else was paper.
One of the attractions was that there was a DQ right next door, at the other end of the car park. It was walk-up window service only, and it wasn’t uncommon to see a car pull up and park, and people get out to go order from both restaurants.
Sonic! Yes!
Some of the carhops(mostly teen girls and guys) wear skates around here.
ETA, aren’t Sonics everywhere?
Food was decent quality fast food, you ate it in the car and the waitresses tended to be pretty.
A decent experience but nothing amazing.
Seems like skates in a crowded parking lot would be a HUGE liability for employers. I can’t believe there are Sonics that still do that.
The one by my house did, but they quit like 10 or so years ago.
One of my best friend’s parents owned an A&W when I was a teenager. Place was wonderful. The Teenburger was the quintessential bacon cheeseburger, and we always departed with a “free to us” half gallon of draft root beer in the waxed carton, which never made it home. Hell, that carton had a straw hole already punched in it! They knew what would happen.
They skate on the side walk around the Sonic. They are never where cars are moving.
I’ve seen a disaster with 2 carhops and full trays but they were walking. They walk very fast, and I guess, not looking. Both went down, drinks and food flew everywhere. It was a mess.
I love Sonic. It allows me to eat on the run and my phobia is placated by being in my own space. Win-win for me.
