Before Ralph Nader, cars were fun. For generations of joy-riders, a purring V-8 was a vehicle for play and pleasure. Dining at a true and classic drive-in is an apotheosis of car culture. Cruise into the parking lot and find a space. Blink your headlights. Here comes running—or roller skating—a carhop to take your order. Moments later, you are presented a tray of cheeseburgers, fries, and root beers to be hung on a half-lowered car window. Turn up the radio and plow into an alfresco, al auto cheap-eats feast.
Long before 1948, when the brothers McDonald started serving fifteen-cent hamburgers and ten-cent milk shakes at their quick-service eatery in San Bernardino, California, drive-ins were a fact of culinary life in the United States. Today McDonald’s and its ilk offer drive-through service, which means you receive your bagged chow then go on your way; but the drive-in has always been a more social event—entertainment as well as a meal. Chevy and Ford and Plymouth owners pull bumper-to-bumper like different breeds of animal gathering at a favorite watering hole. Off-the-menu thrills include the opportunity to show off that new pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror and to flirt with diners in the vehicle parked nearby. Perfumed by a swirl of high-octane fumes, luminous fresh-rubbed carnauba wax, and onions frying on the griddle, a drive-in is more than a fast-food restaurant. It is curbside Americana with a Chuck Berry beat.
The original attraction of drive-ins was speed. When the first “Pig Stands” opened in Texas, in the 1920s, tray boys became known as carhops because they literally hopped onto customers’ running boards to take orders even before the arriving diners slowed to a stop. Like eager-to-please pump jockeys from the golden age of gas stations, carhops in search of big tips were polite, pleasant, and even entertaining. At the late Sivils’ Drive-In outside Houston, tray girls wore satin majorette costumes and high white boots and patrolled the parking lot in military cadence, marching to the rhythm of music blasted by loudspeakers.
Although they may seem as much a part of pop culture’s distant past as bobby sox and jitterbugging, drive-ins still exist all around the country. Many are virtual time capsules, doing business exactly as they did fifty years ago. Some maintain the spirit of car-friendly quick eats and camaraderie but no longer offer car-window service. Others are precious museum pieces, such as the legendary Porky’s of St. Paul. Originally opened in 1953 by Ray Truelson, this burger-and-root-beer shop became known for its crisp, onion ring garnish. At one time there were four of them in the Twin Cities, but the business went belly-up in the 1970s. In 1990 it was revived in St. Paul in all its do-wop glory, without the carhops but still serving Twinburgers.
Being generally wieldy and quintessentially American, the hamburger is a pillar of drive-in cuisine. At the Sycamore Drive-In in Bethel, Connecticut, carhops deliver overstuffed, double Dagwoodburgers pocketed in wax paper. The proper companion is house-made root beer that can be either wickedly sweet or refreshingly brut, depending on whether yours is drawn from the top or bottom of the keg.
Root beer, known during Prohibition as “the temperance beverage,” has been the axiomatic drive-in drink since the 1920s, when the first A&W stands opened in California. At Hires Big H, which has several curb-service outlets in Salt Lake City, Utah, root beer comes in five sizes, from “baby” to “large.” And of course there are root beer floats to accompany a juicy quarter-pound Big H burger topped with bacon, ham, or pastrami, your choice of cheese, and crunchy onion rings. At Indiana’s Mug ’n’ Bun, where pork tenderloin sandwiches are the thing to eat, the root beer is as luxurious as dessert wine: dark, creamy, complex, and spicy.
Some of the most exemplary drive-ins are summer-only. At the first signs of spring, locals start cruising into the lot of Harry’s in Colchester, Connecticut, waiting for come-hither smoke from the old drive-in’s extra-thick, hand-formed hamburgers to start wafting from the grill. At open-year-round drive-ins in the temperate South, barbecue is as much the favored entree as hamburgers or hot dogs, and the preferred libation is sweet tea. An attendant at the Beacon of Spartanburg, South Carolina, once bragged to us that the kitchen used two tons of sugar every week to sweeten its tea, which is served in titanic glasses guaranteed to put the sugar content in any soda pop to shame. The Beacon’s choice meal is known as Outside Pork A-Plenty, which is hacked-up hunks of hickory-cooked pork on a bun with cool slaw buried under sweet onion rings and a mountain of fried potatoes.
The biggest drive-in on earth, adored by all traveling trenchermen, is the Varsity of Atlanta where, until late in the twentieth century, curb boys used to sing the highlights of the menu. Serving 10,000 customers a day (twice that many when Georgia Tech plays at home), the Varsity is a virtual nation that even boasts its own language. Order “a Yankee dog, a ring, a string, and an FO”; you’ll receive a hot dog with a yellow-mustard streak, onion rings, French fries, and an icy frosted orange drink. Our favorite story about the Varsity is told by Texas senator Phil Gramm. When he was at college in Atlanta, the Journal-Constitution had a party for all its paper boys. The organizer pulled in and ordered six thousand hamburgers, to go. Without missing a beat, veteran order-taker Erby Walker shot back, “Whatcha drinkin’?”