The Food of Our Forefathers

We all hold on to summer in different ways. I can’t recite a sappy list, because I don’t really know what other people do to pay homage to the sappiest of seasons, and to be brutally honest, I’ve no ritual myself. I’ve been sojourned in this city my entire life, and at the end of every summer I find myself piously stuck to working whatever job I have without making plans to travel or camp or cottage. So this morning as I rose, late as usual, and partial to the idea of going out for Korean I thought to myself, how in the world could I honor the readers that give my meanderings through food land the once over, especially when they find themselves back in the cool, sweaty grip of fall, creeping a couple weeks away? What was cliché and summery? Sappy, yet aestival? (That also means summery.)

Hamburgers.

That was my answer. I pride myself on my own gastronomic sense- how I can write about food and make it culturally poignant, and not only an issue of mere eating for the sake of saving money and filling stomachs? If you find yourself starting school and saddened by that fact, yearning for the previous months you spent not going to school know that this review is here for you. Let it warm the cockles of your summertime heart (there’s a phrase I’ll use again). I’ll even join in the nostalgic fun.

When I was a young adherent of the Dane Cook of martial arts (that’s Karate, for those of you unfamiliar with the way of the fist), it was a ritual of my father and I after every class, every Saturday morning to visit Sonny’s Drive-In: a hamburger joint. Now, I don’t think my father brought me because he really thought long and hard about how much I’d love hamburgers. I think it was just a way for him to visit the owner (whom I’ve come to know as Sonny, though that name is no part of his identity at all), one of his many friends in the food business. If I had any memory of the place it was of my strange attachment to the nameless arcade I would always play. If memory serves, I operated as some big, hyper-masculine shirtless blonde man wrestling tigers in a coliseum. I never got further than that. But I played it. Every weekend. After every class I more or less got a whooping in.

That was some twenty years ago. Now, as an old man, and anonymous, and without my father, I found myself venturing there, thinking about how good the hamburgers must be, because the otherwise outmoded lot that is Sonny’s Drive-In is still getting business to this day. I know this because I’ve always been around, passing it by, observing.

Although I didn’t expect the place to change in the least, I at least expected someone there to happily greet me. That is how I biasly constructed the memory of my past. So, if anything changed, it may have been Sonny’s disposition, because he was still there, working hard and serving customers, older than ever; now in the company of a faceless employee working the fryers and decked out in a white uniform reminiscent of Americana’s hamburger shop past. Yes, everything was the same. The steel counter, the sneeze guard glass where you’d choose the toppings for whatever hamburger or hot dog you wanted to eat, the red tile, the glowing menu board where clip-on letters and numbers were used to spell out items and their prices, even the chocolate shake machine was still running, albeit eerily. The arcades were different though, and the ceiling too: brown painted faux wood floorboards now lay overhead.

There’s nowhere to sit in the place, only a legless table attached to the glass wall that looks out onto the modern world where one can stand and eat, and maybe cry over the fact that they can’t be part of a more nostalgic, genuine, naïve time when Marty McFly got his mom to fall in love with him.

Whatever.

For me, Sonny’s was a scary place. I’ve never been more intimidated ordering a hamburger and fries and soda in archaic cup. Though customers were coming and going, ordering food and telling me I wouldn’t be sorry, I could tell I was getting on the helps’ nerve critically looking over a menu that ran the gamut from hamburger to hot dog to fish and chips to scallops and fries (probably the most intriguing choice on the menu). And you’d be hard pressed to really find any kind of deal or combination plate like the ones that accompany most burger joints. You just pick and choose from the menu and whatever the cost is, the cost is. Still, it was a little cheaper than most conventional places. And with that, I placed my order, and took Sonny’s taking my dirty money and handling my burger thereafter as a sign not of poor standards, but of his tender regress to a safer time in our forefathers’ history when food sanitation wasn’t a big deal.

Again. Whatever.

So, a little standoffish, I went along the line, chose my toppings, had my items placed in a greasy paper bag and went outside to the weathered picnic tables, imprinted with the word ‘Sonny’s’ and carved hearts with monikers such as ‘Dave + Sarah’, and ‘F and A Forever.’ I could only imagine how hard my food would be to stomach.

Now, there are typical things to expect when eating a hamburger; charred, savoury meat paddies; soft, starch ridden buns. Usually, these generalizations are found with every plain paddy when eating out. I expected it with mine. However, there were some flavours I just couldn’t understand. Like a paddy that seemed a little sour, and pickles that were rubber, and all too squeaky. If not for these characteristics I may have very well said my hamburger was okay, but that there was nothing special about it. Still, in a city with so many places offering the good ground round, the only thing that may make Sonny’s burgers sellable might be patriotism and some notion that its hamburgers are somehow authentic, having earned their burgery place after so long.

The fries too were typical fare, though I admit better than the fast food chains we’re used to going to. Not scrawny and brittle in the least, but hardy and firm, crunchy if eaten immediately out of the fryer. But again, this is matched by so many. If there was one bit of serendipity about them it may have been the flecks of batter that managed to land in my box (runoff from the fingers of deep fried fish). This was something I thoroughly enjoyed, though unintended, obviously, by the cooks.

Maybe I was trying to recapture the past, or maybe I created the memory that my past was pretty dope, though I can’t for the life of me remember how stellar the food at Sonny’s was, and maybe there’s a reason for that. After all, twenty years ago, Sonny was a lot younger, and so was I. Perspective certainly may have been lacking. Now, I was a mere bald stranger. Certainly, I could have reminded him who I was, but why break an old man’s heart? More importantly, why break mine, especially if he didn’t care? For now, I’ll pretend Sonny is a man who loves the people he serves, not a man who can’t retire because his food shows no greater competitive value.

Sonny's Drive-In
(519) 884-1750
256 Weber St N Waterloo,
ON N2J 3H6

ANY PAYMENT

SUN-THURS 10 am – 1 am

FRI-SAT 10 am – 3 am

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