In my dads small town, they have the Frostee, which has limited hours, and I’m not sure is even open in the winter. It’s next to mini golf, so it’s tradition to get a cone after we play in the summer.
I remember seeing a Tastee-Freez in Asheville a couple of years ago but it looks like they changed their name to The Freeze in February.
Big Boy is hard to find, but Norms is expanding! Before the pandemic, they were planning on opening two or three new ones out the in San Fernando Valley.
Nice. They have a steak dinner at a great price point.
This thread reminds me of a little restaurant in my hometown called Jock’s. We used to go there when I was a kid (it was a favorite of my grandparents’).
Jock’s closed long ago. It was well over forty years ago and might have been fifty. But for some reason, the people who bought the building never took down the sign. As recently as two or three years ago, you could still see the sign for Jock’s on the front of the building even though it hadn’t operated as a restaurant for decades.
I found Dog & Suds Root Beer at a local hardware store about a week ago. I just might drink one of them right now.
I remember Woolco, but not fondly. The store in my area was dirty and the merchandise was very poor quality.
Man, I just remembered Bit O’ Scotland. They were essentially a fish and chips restaurant in an old Craftsman house on Westwood Blvd between Pico and Olympic. They had cod, shrimp and scallops. You could get them either breaded and fried or sauteed in butter. Fries were all fresh and perfectly fried. Not greasy. Dessert was either a square of homemade shortbread (which I always ordered) or a nondescript cheesecake (order the shortbread). We went there ALL the time. One of the waitresses was the mother of one of my brother’s classmates, so we got friendly with her and her sister (a fellow waitress there). It was homey. The menu was limited, but the food was GREAT. I haven’t had fish and chips as good since they lost their lease.
There was always a wait. The waiting area was a screened in patio area in the front with lawn chairs and a giant swordfish mounted on the side wall. God, I miss it.
It took me a while to dredge up memories of the restaurants from my childhood.
I remember dinners with my grandparents at Spenger’s in Berkeley. I loved the maze of small rooms and always got the cracked crab. For pastries and sundaes, there was Edie’s where they had eclairs with real cream as the filling. Both are out of business (I didn’t realize until I looked it up just now that Spenger’s had been around for 128 years when it closed in 2018, so not only my grandparents ate there, but their parents as well).
Closer to home, there was On Lock Sam’s in Stockton and summertime meals at the Elim Grove Cafe in Sonoma county. On Lock Sam’s is still around, but the Elim Grove Cafe is now a bakery.
There actually are a couple of Dog n Suds drive in still open. There is one right across the state line in Richmond, Il. Took my Grandsons to it last summer. Not bad. Root beer isn’t as enticing as A&W.
Dog & Suds 1970s in sort-of nearby Rockford
Possibly unrelated but similarly named Dog-N-Suds Drive-In in Lafayette, IN from about 1960. Just dial 2.
I live in Lafayette, and can tell you with authority that not only is it the same chain, but there’s also an outlet in West Lafayette. We also have perhaps the sole surviving Mountain Jack’s, a onetime franchiser specializing in prime rib. Just ate Thanksgiving dinner there last week.
From the 70s through the 80s, here are some restaurants that I went to as a child and teenager that I haven’t been to since:
Also as a teen, I often went to Ax-Man Surplus, which had three locations around Minneapolis/St. Paul. They still exist, but I moved away. As the name suggests, they buy surplus anything for pennies on the dollar, and sell it for only slightly more. Obscure electronic devices/components, giant rolls of packing tape, a barrel of molded Jabba-The-Hutt heads whatever. Their inventory was constantly changing, so you’d go back on a regular basis just to see what sort of crazy stuff they had for sale. They had a sense of humor in the descriptive pricing signs they placed on the various items and bins, which made it more entertaining. If you live in the Twin Cities, I highly recommend a visit.
There was an Arthur Treacher’s in a food court near Yankee Stadium in the late nineties. Ms. P and I would go to that food court occasionally, since she worked nearby. I’m not sure if I ever chose AT, since there was also a Taco Bell there.
2 blocks from the old Yankee Stadium was a Mr. Softy Ice Cream truck every game day.
I wonder if it will be back next year.
Mr. Softee is one of the things I miss most about New York. We have a knockoff called Mr. Soft in our neighborhood, but it’s not the same.
York Steak House is the second business mentioned in this thread at which I worked at some point in the past.
In 1977, my first year of college, I worked at the York Steak House in Syracuse, New York.
Apparently hiring me is the kiss of death for a business.
My mother actually worked for three companies mentioned here all of which went bankrupt. Zaire, Ames and Bradlees. Previously she had worked for two other companies they went bankrupt (a Swedish rubber manufacturer and a British pharmaceutical company).
She finally got a job as an accountant at a Catholic school. We joked that even she couldn’t bankrupt the Catholic Church. Within a year, she had uncovered accounting shenanigans that got the principal dismissed and booted from the religious order and the CPA losing his license. A few years later the whole Diocese filed for bankruptcy!
The school is still going strong. Judging by its website it seems like in the 15 years since she left it had changed from a largely Irish and Italian community to overwhelmingly Hispanic.
By the way, some of the chains mentioned are now gone, but remnants remain, sometimes quite substantial. Like Zayre, for instance. They’ve been gone for a long time but they started TJ Maxx and BJ’s Wholesale Club stores, and both chains are reasonably successful today. And Sears is mostly gone but Allstate Insurance and Discover Card are still viable, and they were both started by Sears (which also owned at various times other businesses and brands like Lands’ End, Craftsman, Die Hard and so forth). And Alexander’s Department Stores in the New York City area are long gone but the company remains as a real estate trust owning, among other things, 731 Lexington Avenue, the Bloomberg headquarters.
TG&Y was my favorite store when I was growing up in the 60s; we generally called it “the dime store,” although there were other stores, like Woolworth’s, that would qualify for that name. The range of stuff TG&Y crammed into a relatively small space boggled my youthful mind. It seemed to me that you could buy anything there.
I was amazed to learn from Wikipedia that the chain hung on by its fingernails until 2001.
Me too. I can still hum the theme. Much better than Bungalow Bar (tastes like tar) another truck in my part of Queens.
Though I seldom got ice cream, I got lemon Italian Ices in a cup. Lemon ices don’t seem to exist in California, only weird fruit flavors.