You can still get grease on your upholstery at a few drive-in diners

I wish someone — one of these up-and-coming, hip young chefs — would reinvent the drive-in concept for the 21st century,” says Colby Garrelts, the James Beard Award-winning chef who co-owns Bluestem and Rye with his wife, pastry chef Megan Garrelts. He recalls meals at one of the local A&W drive-ins during his childhood. “We also had a local chain called Smaks,” he says. “I loved that, too.”

Local Pig honcho Alex Pope shows no signs of altering his restaurant’s metal trays to latch onto car windows, and Novel’s Ryan Brazeal seems unlikely to put his servers in roller skates. But I know what Garrelts means. I miss drive-in eating, too.

But whenever my nostalgia grows acute, I get in the car, imagine that I’m driving a Pontiac GTO with an 8-track player in the dash, and cruise to one of the metro’s few remaining relics of the drive-in era. Obviously, I do this most often in the summer.

The oldest such restaurant still operating in the area is Homer’s Drive Inn, in Leavenworth (1320 South Fourth Street). It opened in 1931 as a rustic shack selling Prohibition-friendly root beer before expanding to include sandwiches. As the business took off, owner Homer McKelvey employed only male carhops (they wore ties to give the joint some class). It moved to the current venue in 1938.

Homer’s is still a drive-in but only in the loosest sense of the word. Most of the customers eat inside, mowing down breakfast, lunch or dinner in red leatherette booths. But if you want to time-travel a little, just call ahead (use a land line if you really wanna be old-school), place an order, drive to the front of the whitewashed building and honk. A server will come running out with your order.

Two years after Homer’s opened, Kansas City’s iconic Winstead’s (101 Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard) started serving steakburgers and milkshakes on the Country Club Plaza. For a time, it fought a tough battle against a more popular rival drive-in, Sidney’s, a few blocks away. But Winstead’s had the last laugh, outlasting Sidney’s by nearly four decades.

The Winstead’s-versus-Sidney’s days were the pinnacle of KC’s drive-in era. The 1960 city directory lists no fewer than 65 drive-in restaurants. Nine of those listings belonged to various locations of Mugs Up Root Beer Drive In.

There’s only one Mugs Up left, in Independence, Missouri (700 East 23rd Street). The bright-orange-and-white structure dates to 1957 and still employs carhops. For decades, the sign in front of the building boasted that it was “Bill and Ann’s” Mugs Up, but those names have been removed. “There was a divorce,” whispered one of the carhops, snapping a metal tray to the car window. “Only one of them got the restaurant.”

Which one “got it” is, like the recipe for the house-made root beer, a proprietary secret.

It’s not a secret — more of a mystery,
really — whether Harold’s Drive-In, just west of the Paseo (1337 Admiral Boulevard), ever had carhops. Nancy Smith, who bought the now 57-year-old venue in 1998 from original owner Harold McBain, doesn’t think so.

“Until the late 1970s, the building had an open window facing the street,” she says. “People drove into the parking lot, came up to the counter, ordered, paid and left.”

Smith runs the breakfast-and-lunch spot with her two sisters, Mary and Caramae, and there’s only a worn wooden bench in front of the counter. If you dine at Harold’s, you really do eat it and beat it.

That’s also the case at another legendary urban drive-in, the 53-year-old Humdinger (2504 East Ninth Street), which encourages its patrons to pay for their food (in cash, please; there’s an ATM near the entrance) and take it someplace else. The Humdinger, which serves breakfast and lunch, offers a relatively extensive menu: cheeseburgers, tacos, barbecue sandwiches, fried shrimp, pork tenderloin.

That kind of variety used to be the order of the day at drive-ins, which were made obsolete by franchises such as McDonald’s and Sonic. Another thing that hasn’t kept up with the times: brain sandwiches.

Specifically, the fried-pork-brain sandwiches that shared the menu with the usual loose-meat burgers, chili dogs and shakes at the family-run Clem’s (10802 East 23rd Street, Independence, Missouri). Naturally, I’ve tried the thing. It had a tempura-like exterior, and the interior was fluffy and soft and sort of earthy-tasting. But there’s no more brain now that Clem’s has become Stacks. The change, which happened a few years ago, brought that popular drive-in at 3828 Chouteau Trafficway to the former Clem’s space. Nowadays, the menu is composed of burgers, wings, burritos and tenderloins, along with a very tasty and generous mostaccioli dinner with meatballs, a cheese ravioli for less than six bucks, and chicken-parmesan sandwiches.

“When we first opened,” said a young woman working the counter when I stopped by, “we got a few people still asking for brain sandwiches. But no one ever does anymore.”

An eclectic menu is also featured at Teresa’s Drive-In (6450 Truman Road), which serves a hell of a double cheeseburger, hot dogs, chili dogs, Italian steak sandwiches and pork tenderloins. There also are fried-shrimp baskets, tacos, chicken tenders and grilled cheese sandwiches. The 47-year-old drive-in finally installed a drive-thru window a few years ago, accommodating the kind of latter-day patrons who balk at leaving their cars to order a meal. (There remains a tiny, spotlessly clean dining room for those who opt to stretch their legs.) Teresa’s is still family-owned, and there’s a palpable camaraderie here, with good-natured bantering audible from the open, shiny kitchen.

“Most customers prefer to come in to order,” one of the employees tells me. “They want to find out what’s going on in the neighborhood.”

And that, of course, is the biggest difference between yesterday’s drive-ins and the drive-thrus we’ve become so accustomed to: actually talking to the person who’s making your lunch.