My wife and I have a set routine after landing back at Gatwick. We collect our bags, clear customs and are reunited with our car (Meet and Greet parking is by far the best value for money and avoids an hour or so of inhaling a mini-cab’s ‘vehicle deodoriser’). Then we head for the McDonalds ‘Drive-thru’ restaurant next to the BP garage, where Joanna normally goes for the Big Mac meal, while I vacillate between the McChicken sandwich and a bucket of chicken nuggets with a side order of fries.
We look forward to this guilty secret so much that often we discuss our order in detail while queuing at passport control. Whatever we choose fills us up and is a marked improvement on what you can buy on-board. It is also immeasurably more interesting than those boxes BA now hand out towards the end of a long-haul flight containing a stale bagel and tiny slice of processed cheese.
But what we really like about it is the drive-through element — or, rather, drive–thru. It makes us feel just a little more contemporary — because if you hadn’t noticed, drive-thrus are suddenly springing up all over the place, though we will surely never take them to our hearts quite so readily as they do in America.
It wasn’t until 1985 that Europe’s first drive-thru (a McDonald’s, obviously) opened: at the Nutgrove Shopping Centre in Dublin of all places. But the history of drive-thrus is a little contentious. According to the writer Michael Karl Witzel, they were first ‘tested’ in America as far back as 1931 by the Texas Pig Stand chain. Most people, though, regard the official start date as 1947, courtesy of the Red’s Giant Hamburg joint in Springfield, Missouri on the famous Route 66.
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