Oh my, stopping at the A&W on the drive from Sacramento to Shasta Lake every year was the BEST. Vicious valley heat, usually 100+F, no A/C in the car (it had it, but you couldn’t run it while towing a boat) and man, that first drink from the frosty icy mug full of delicious awesomeness was pure heaven. I dunno what happened to that root beer but it was SO much better back in the day, now it’s kinda bitter and thin tasting instead of being creamy vanilla-ey with tHose little crisps of ice that would float up to the top, damn. The burgers had thin shredded lettuce that would get all over the car and the fries were fucking perfect. Yeah, nostalgia just grabbed me by the booboo.
I had some onion rings at Sonic and they fucking sucked–why are they SWEET? So disgusting.
Some of the guys at the local Dutch Bros coffee drive through take orders from the line wearing skates or sometimes on skateboards but they’re just having fun. One guy likes to wear a cape.
Swenson’s! Yes! Not girls on skates, but college students of both genders running to your car before you even get a chance to park it. I’m constantly afraid they’ll get hit!
Swenson’s is in my area, so I’m a bit biased, but yes, drive in food is amazing
Before McD ran them out of business, there were three really excellent drive-ins where I grew up. Privately owned, quality food. One of them was way ahead of Burger King with char-broiled burgers, done over actual flames, called (appropriately enough) The Charco-Burger. Still one of the best burgers I ever had. You could also get a basket of deep fried shrimp and fries and house made onion rings. Another favorite, called The Bun Drive-in, was the favorite hangout for high school kids with cars. Above the drive-in was a glass booth, where a local DJ would play records and take requests on weekends. The building is still there, but sadly no longer selling huge baskets of onion rings for $2, or any other food. At both places, someone came to your car to take your order.
The only two to survive to this day are a burger joint and a fried chicken place, both landmarks with a staunch following.
There is still a drive-in with roller-skating waitresses in La Crosse, WI. The food is decent, with excellent (IMHO) root beer.
My home town has a drive in (order at one window, pick up in another), that has OK food but excellent (IMHO) malts/shakes. It is more the experience than the food.
It was just a couple of blocks away so biked there on occasion.
Don’t forget Chuck-A-Burger. There’s one left, still featuring car hops, and a favorite of people who drive classic cars and cycles.
Steak (no one ever used the full name) had ceramic plates, real glasses and utensils. I don’t remember the others, but no teenager’s room was complete without at least one glass from Steak 'N Shake.
Skates only worked if the place was laid out in a concourse style, with the parking spots directly connected to the kitchen/dining area. A carhop on skates with a full tray crossing a parking lot in the Midwest would have been a nightly disaster.
As for the food, the sandwich menu at the remaining Steak 'N Shakes is pretty much unchanged from the stuff they served 50 years ago. I suspect it’s the same for the basic burgers and fries at places like Friendly’s, Bob’s Big Boy, etc.
I see a few carhops on roller skates at my local Sonic. Mostly not, though. And I like Sonic for what it is. Tots and slushies are pretty good, burgers are okay.
When I was very young, my parents occasionally treated us to dinner at the drive-in in the next town. It might have been called Dairy Barn, and that’s absolutely the only thing I remember about it. I think I’d remember if there had been roller skates, and I guess the food was all right if my parents went more than once.
And I think that’s my whole experience with carhop restaurants. No A&W stands around these parts, AFAIK.
IIRC, the film American Graffiti had drive-ins with roller skating carhops. The roller skating carhop thing always seemed to me to be the central Sacramento valley like Modesto, Stockton, Fresno, etc.
I live really close to the Burger Master drive-in in Bellevue Washington. It’s also one of Bill Gates favorite places and he lives about 2 miles away (it’s on the way from his house to the Microsoft campus). It’s pretty decent. I take visitors from Asia there every once in a while for the quincentennial American experience. Most ask “where are the roller skating carhops?”
In my 70 years, mostly spent in California, I have never ever seen a skating carhop in the wild. Drive-ins but not drive-thrus existed in my Los Angaleno suburban youth; their grub was about what’s expected for under a quarter. By the early 1970’s my favorite such chain was Munchies, found in the L.A. and S.F. areas. The burgers, a dime each, may have included actual meat. I graduated to deli sandwiches, then to taco trucks. But drive-ins now? Pshaw.
Didn’t (some) Big Boys offer carhop service? I definitely could be misremembering, but it seems to me the one in my neck of the woods had carhops in the summer months.
I think that some franchisees (there were different groups running Big Boys in different regions) operated as drive-ins, at least originally, though I think that the chain transitioned to more of a “family restaurant” style (with sit-down seating).
In the Midwest, where I grew up, we had Marc’s Big Boys, and those were all strictly table service, as I remember it.
Shoneys Big Boy originally offered car hops and inside dining.
Printed on the menu
I’ve seen a newspaper photo of Shoneys Little Rock featuring car hops in the early 60’s. The restaurant was open but the car hops were gone when I moved here in 1980. Shoneys closed mid 90’s.
I looked it up. Shoneys and Big Boy were a merger in the early fifties. Shoneys went through several name changes. Big Boy was completely dropped by the early 80’s.
Shoneys went bankrupt in 2000. A few locations have reopened under the name. But it’s really all new.
