I know that place, IIRC it is on J St. not too far from CSU Sacramento. We have a Shakey’s here in Palm Springs that is OK for take-out, but always super busy with big crowds if you want to eat there.
You have to order double mushrooms or you’ll only get about 10 on a medium pizza!
Yeah, mostly they’d travel from hundreds of miles because there’s jack and squat else there! (I’ve lived in both Durango and GJ).
Yes, I know you could go to Telluride. But why would you want to, even if you had a money tree to do it with?
I worked at a Shakey’s in Janesville, WI the summer of '92. It didn’t have the kid-friendly stuff that seem to have been the trademark of the chain. It was a basic pizza buffet place with a few video games in one corner. Pretty standard and boring pizza. What I remember most was that the other big buffet offering was chicken. At the end of every night after most of the crowd had left we had to pull apart whole raw chickens into pieces and dump them into 55 gallon plastic drums that would be filled with marinade. Yum. Not.
I’m pretty sure it’s still there, just off I-90 at the WI 26 exit next time you’re traveling through southern Wisconsin. Just prepare to be disappointed if you’re looking for the player piano.
Shakey’s is still going strong in the Philippines. According to their website, they have over 100 restaurants across the country.
I was starting to feel lonely with all the California and SW Shakeys memories here. Joliet was the one we went to when we wer kids. The straw hats, player pianos and the window where you could stand on the bench and watch your pizza getting made.
I can’t remember where it was, but years later I dragged the family into a Shakeys when we were on vacation, and “boom” there went my nostalgia bubble. I was stuck in a nowhere place, pizza slices under warming lamps, bad salad and a surly teen-age waitress.
Oh, for the old days.
Man, the Shakeys on Rockville pike is where my family would go every two weeks or so. They had a dixieland jazz band there on Tuesdays which is why my dad liked it. I remember the cool stained glass windows, the pizza making machine, the window with the bench for kids to watch, and the big box in the corner that displayed the order numbers ready for pickup. Shakey’s is the reason why I love thin crust pizza. It really sucked when they changed the decor from a communal eating style to the ubiquitous, family-chain blandness.
I also remember Farrell’s being the way that **Taters ** describes it. I only went to the Horn & Horn twice. We loved it, but as a family of light eaters, it was just too damn much for us to eat without totally stuffing ourselves.
There wasa *South Park * about Casa Bonita? I’ve been to one of those in Tulsa, sometime around 1989. It was a bizarre concept for a restaurant, but the food was ok.
I had my 6th birthday party at the Shakey’s in San Angelo, TX. This would’ve been November 1982. I used to love that place. They had a cool arcade and the theater room where they projected old cartoons and Three Stooges shorts on a big screen. I remember the food being decent back then too. Of course at that age, food quality was maybe the third or fourth most important feature of a restaurant.
It was. They closed it after a fire in the mid-1990’s.
And my parents divorced, but still I live on!
For all I know, Shakey’s may have been the only pizza place in Arkansas in my early childhood days. At any rate, the one in North Little Rock at the I-40/I-30 interchange (by the armory, near NLR Old Main High School) was the only pizza restaurant I ever saw the inside of until I was at least 10 or 11. We lived about an hour away from LR, but had to go there about once a month or so for my sister’s dentist appointments. Sometimes, we’d stop at Shakey’s for lunch or dinner. I liked it, but I suspect if I were to time-travel back to 1972-73 and eat there, I wouldn’t now. This was a classic Shakey’s with the straw hats/red & white striped shirts/bench & window into the kitchen.
My sister’s pediatric orthodontia wound to a close, and soon after we moved farther away from LR. I didn’t go back for a dozen years or so, until I was in college, when I was dating a girl from North Little Rock. This was in the early 80s, and that store, like most Shakey’s, was on its last legs. Nothing particularly memorable about it. It closed soon after. The building housed a variety of restaurants and other things through the years, as the surrounding area declined. I seem to recall that even the building was gone last time I drove by there, but I may be misremembering.