Fast Food

 

I saw a thing online the other day that asked the question "What was your favorite fast food when you were a kid?"  Welllll... when I was a kid, there was no Fast Food as we know it today.  No drive up windows, no garbled speaker menus to shout into, but there were Automats.

"What-a-mats?", you might ask.  Note the picture above.  Those little windows you see had food in them.  Hot meals, sandwiches, desserts, whatever you were in the mood for.  You inserted your coins into the slot, nickles or dimes or quarters, depending on how expensive your tastes were, and the door popped open, allowing you access to your selection.

Now that was fast food.  Instant, actually, and fresh as could be, since the unseen cooks and caterers behind those windowed walls were constantly refilling the empty slots.

 

We often visited the one on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, usually during shopping trips into the city  That's right, there were no malls then either.  You wanted to shop, you went into the city.  The brass sign over the doorway said Horn & Hardart, and that sign is still there, though the business itself is long gone.

Horn & Hardart was the first company to introduce automats into the US, and that one on Chestnut Street was the very first one, opening way back in 1902.  The original concept though was invented a few years earlier, 1895, in Berlin Germany.

Every now and then, as I sit in line at the drive-thru of McDonald's, or Burger King, or KFC, or Chic-fil-a, [pick one] I sometimes wish I could just dig a couple of quarters out of the loose change rattling around in the console of my car and wander into H&H to have my favorite [back then] of a hot open faced roast beef sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes, and finish it off with some sweet  and creamy rice pudding.  Heaven for a 10 year old.

#fastfood #automat

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