What would be really cool is if the carhops had to compete for customers and you could watch them hip-checking each other as they carried their trays out to the cars.
New Windsor eatery serves food on skates
NEW WINDSOR — Old is the new new at New Windsor's new Sonic Drive-In.
What, after all, do you call a business whose very name invokes the kind of curvilinear architecture the Jetsons once enjoyed?
Or a wait staff that glides up to you on roller skates to deliver your order at one of 20 parking "stalls?" Or a menu that brags it offers 168,000 drink combinations?
The latest addition to Sonic's 3,700 franchises, now making their way north from their roots in the South, was doing a land-office business Tuesday, scrambling to introduce newcomers to its car-centric cuisine. It's the first one in Orange County; others are in Kingston and Wappingers Falls.
Franchise partner Steve Roberts almost blushed when mentioning those 168,000 drink combinations.
"I'm not sure of the math," he said.
Actually, I am curious about the 168, 000 drink combinations, and I’m sure the burgers and fries are first-rate, for a drive-in. Reason I won’t be going is I’m just never comfortable eating at any restaurant where the wait staff has to perform. There’s a place in Chicago, Ed Debevic’s---Famous Since 1984! Their motto, “Eat and Get Out!”---where the waiters and waitresses dress and act like they were characters in one of the original Gidget movies. An actress friend of mine worked there back in the day and she convinced me it would be fun to try it out. She wasn’t working the day the blonde and I went. Our gum-smacking waitress made me drop my menu when she slid on one knee into the booth beside me, and with her behind propped up against the back of the bench at shoulder height, licked the tip of her pencil, put it to her pad, and said, “Whadya havin’, doll?”
Cute, huh?
My problem with this sort of thing is that I always feel pressured to play along and how do you play along with that?
Plus, how do you tip? You don’t tip. You leave a review. “Food good, service excellent, I was going to leave twenty per cent, but your performance was derivative and predictable and that style of shoe had gone out of fashion by 1953. So here’s fifteen. Buy yourself some acting lessons.”
It’d be a little different at a place like Sonic, but I’d still feel the urge to score the service. “You got the order safely to the car, without falling on your ass, but the root beer float dribbled. Four point five.”
At any rate, read all of Jeremiah Horrigon’s story at the Times Herald-Record.
Sonic Drive-In is a chain. Here’s the website.
Speaking of tips. If you can swing it, please hit the tip jar on your way out. Thank you very much.
I don't eat burgers much any more, so it's been a while since I ate at Sonic. But as I recall, their jalapeno burger was pretty good.
Posted by: Mark | Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 12:54 PM
I got kicked out of Ed Debevics once. No reason to go into all of the particulars as to why, suffice to say, we made our waiter cry.
Posted by: Cleveland Bob | Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 03:28 PM