EATING OUT ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE (7-2003)

Have you eaten out lately? If you’re like most Americans, 
you have. And that is one thing that makes us different 
today than 30 years ago: the frequency of eating out.

During my early and middle teen-age years, our family ate 
out rarely. Once in a while we’d eat at the old Roto Grill, 
when it sat on the corner of U.S. 31 and S.R. 252. But 
usually, we would eat at Burger Chef.

Burger Chef was the first fast food restaurant I can 
remember. There was one in Columbus on National Road, right 
next to one of our favorite shopping centers, Shoppers’ 
Fare. For those who are too young to remember, it was 
located very close to where Steak & Shake is now.

The thing about most fast food places back in those days is 
that they didn’t have a dining room. Typically, you would 
go in and buy your food in a bag, then sit out in the car 
and eat it.

But at least the prices were cheap. I remember one 
commercial on TV advertising that you could buy a 
hamburger, a Coke, and an order of fries and still get 
change back from your dollar. Granted, it wasn’t much 
change. But still, compared to today’s prices, it wasn’t 
bad.

Most fast food menus were rather sparse back then, too. 
Nobody ever heard of “supersizing.” Everything came in one 
size, except the soft drinks. They came in small, medium, 
and large for a dime, twenty cents, and a quarter, 
respectively.

One of our favorite fast food restaurants was White Castle. 
The problem is it was located in Indianapolis. Back then, 
the White Castle chain was limited to a few large cities. 
But every time we had occasion to go to the city, we would 
always stop by and order a bag of those 12-cent hamburgers.

Sometime during the 1970s, one fast food chain, Wendy’s, 
introduced an innovation that has really caught on. It was 
the drive-thru window. They already had drive-thru banking; 
now we could order food from our car, too. And we didn’t 
even have to wait for a car hop or eat it in the car. 
Drive-thus were meant to order food to take home.

Things have changed. Burger Chef has gone the way of the 
dinosaur. Almost all fast-food restaurants now have dine-in 
facilities. And the days of being able to buy a whole meal 
for a buck are long gone.

Still, dining out is a treat for us, even though we do it a 
lot more often these days. There are still some fast-food 
values, thanks to the “burger wars” among the top four 
hamburger chains. You can’t buy a whole meal for a dollar, 
but you can get a pretty decent sandwich for one.

The same thing can’t be said for the fancier sit-down 
restaurants, even those that specialize in the lowly 
hamburger. Dinner for three at the Cheeseburger in Paradise 
cost me just over $55.00 last weekend, not counting 
gratuity. The food was average. The dessert was marvelous, 
though.

Today’s dining out options are huge. The menu selections 
have grown, too. Still, I sometimes miss those days when I 
could buy a coke for a nickel or a large chocolate 
milkshake at the local Dairy Queen for a quarter, hard-
earned by selling empty pop bottles at Shelby Avenue 
Market.