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MISC ║ HUMOR
Drive-Thru Cuisine
By Rick Dickert
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Decades after the drive-in movie theater’s popularity has waned, the
drive-thru restaurant window remains a fixture of modern suburbia.
Even if we choose to enjoy our greasy burgers
and fries on plastic molded chairs in the dining
area of our favorite fast food establishment, the
drive-thru window may be useful. When we’re
feeling especially peckish, we can go through the
drive-thru lane and grab a snack to tide us over
till we’re parked.
While the drive-in movie is nearly a thing of
the past, its remarkably low fidelity speaker
system is still alive and well and is used to order
meals as we look at professionally photographed
food items, airbrushed to perfection to stimulate
our taste buds. Clearly none of that advertising
money went into the speaker system though, because
a simple inquiry such as “Hold the vanilla?”
can all too easily become “No salmonella?”
After placing an order, the driver’s told the
price and instructed to pull ahead to the pickup
window. This is not the time for him to become
a correct change hero or search the glove compartment
for napkins from a previous visit. He
should simply drive up to the window with an
eye for any vehicles in front of him, because it’s
tricky to pass burgers and fries around the car
once the airbags have been deployed.
If you’re extremely famished, the drive-thru
offers you the opportunity to buy several orders
for your own consumption under the
premise that it’s for more than one person.
As you’re being handed several food items,
you could say out loud “One for Betty, one for
Gordo and one for me” to disguise the fact that
you’re the only customer involved with that
order. If you want to make it more believable,
you could try to get different combinations of
condiments to further the illusion that there’s
more than one palette to satisfy.
If you’re craving a more exotic item on the
menu, such as a veal sandwich or broiled chicken
breast, you may not want to order it from the
drive-thru. If it’s not a hot seller then chances are
they don’t have one on standby under the heat
lamp and they’ll have to make it from scratch.
124 February 2017 | www.AtlanticAveMagazine.com
In this case, you’ll probably be asked to pay for
the meal and park nearby to wait for that item
to be delivered to your car. If you were ordering
Italian food from a motor home at this point, the
experience would be remarkably like receiving
delivery from a pizza place.
Some people pick up drive-thru in the hopes
of saving time. This can work, but the driver
should not be dining while he’s driving. Even
if he somehow managed to ingest a meal while
operating a motor vehicle with no danger to anyone,
there still could be the stigma of being spotted
waiting at a red light with his knees on the
steering wheel in the two and ten o’clock positions,
holding a jumbo soft drink with a pound of
ice in one hand and navigating steaming mounds
of chili fries to his mouth with the other. You just
don’t see that sort of posturing in the TV commercials
for European sports cars.
Sometimes you get as far as the next county
before realizing that they didn’t actually “hold the
mayo.” If you were trying to save time, you probably
wouldn’t backtrack to set your order straight.
However since the proliferation of mobile phones,
you could have the option of calling the restaurant
to voice your displeasure, but the fast food joint’s
caught onto this. This is why their phone number
probably isn’t printed on the receipt.
If you’re a hungry pedestrian late at night,
you may have stopped by a fast food joint only
to find that the restaurant dining room is closed
but the drive-thru is open. In this case, you probably
have to be quite hungry to stand in line between
a vintage Gremlin and a Hummer, walking
a car length at a time until it’s your turn to stand
beside the window and take possession of your
after hours sustenance.
There is a phenomenon from the drive-in
movie era which hasn’t survived the decades.
That is the employment of servers on roller
skates to take orders and serve food while
rock’n’roll plays on the outdoor speakers of a
drive-in restaurant. While we may long for the
nostalgia a similar mode of operation would
bring today, we should keep in mind the culture
of today. Rather than a charming kid on roller
skates serving food to classic rock’n’roll, we’d
be more likely to be subjected to an individual
leaping our hood on a skateboard as a rapper’s
bass drum stirred our coffee by vibration alone.
Instead of a classic poodle skirt, the server
would be more likely to wear low riding designer
jeans and high riding jockey under shorts.
This brings us back to one of the attractions of
the drive-thru lane, and that is once you have
your food you can make a quick getaway.