Interstate highways that did not have service plazas (which is to say, most of them) had few food options in their earliest days. ![]() By then, Camarano explains, it was what American motorists had come to expect from the road. “That was basically the standard treatment,” says Michael Camarano, a American Automobile Association cartographer who started with the company 43 years ago as a road reporter.įast food didn’t come to most service plazas until the late ’80s and ’90s. Other states had mom-and-pop-style diners. Howard Johnson’s ran the Pennsylvania Turnpike service plazas ( then called “lunchrooms”) until the early 1980s. Typically, they were just diners attached to a gas station. These can be mainly found along the East Coast and are less common throughout the rest of the country: They’re a type of rest stop, not the archetype.ĭuring those early decades, service stations weren’t anything like the shopping mall food courts of today. Service plazas on the toll roads that predated these new highways, though, were grandfathered into the system. ![]() “When you travel, you don’t want to experiment.” At most, they could provide a vending machine with soda and snacks. Joanna Dowling, a historian who specializes in safety rest areas, explains that the federal government forbade states from competing with commercial business along federally funded highways. States instead built modest parks with bathrooms and picnic tables known as safety rest areas. A few early freeways also opened service plazas, but even today, it is generally a toll-road phenomenon.īut the service plaza concept didn’t expand along with the American Interstate Highway System, which was authorized in 1956 and constructed westward over the two decades that followed. State authorities built the stations so that motorists wouldn’t have to exit and reenter the tollway to obtain gas or food, ultimately paying more for the same trip. Service plazas - which are different from other highway dining locales - are rooted in the network of toll roads that preceded the Interstate Highway System. It would be another 50 years before Big Macs were available at seemingly every stop. McDonald’s was only founded a few months before the first toll-road service plaza - the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s South Midway stop - opened in 1940. Roadside dining hasn’t always been dictated by the chains. Why is that - and could change be coming down the pike? For most toll-road drivers, lunch still ultimately amounts to a choice between Popeyes and Roy Rogers. Maryland even added the crabcake-slinging Phillips Seafood, a Baltimore-based chain with several airport locations, to one of its service plazas.īut those are exceptions. Some states have opened small farmers markets and displays hawking local food products. “These are not your grandfather's rest stops,” USA Today declared in 2014, writing that service plazas in states along the Eastern seaboard have undergone renovations to provide Wi-Fi, electric-vehicle charging, and other amenities. Yet things are changing at highway service stations. There’s no chef-led revolution in roadside dining. David Chang hasn’t opened Fuku on the New York State Thruway. You won’t find Federal Donuts on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Stop in at any service plaza - a combined gas station, convenience store, and food court typically found on the median or shoulder of a toll road - and there will likely be a mix of chains like Pizza Hut, Cinnabon, Starbucks, Burger King, and, of course, the Golden Arches. ![]() National chain restaurants are ubiquitous along American highways. ![]() And yet road-trippers are still mostly stuck with McDonald’s. Shake Shack has invaded both airports and train stations. Respected local restaurateurs have reinvigorated Denver’s Union Station. Well-known chefs like Rick Bayless, Michael Voltaggio, and Mike Isabella have casual concepts in major airports across the country. We’re in the midst of a golden age for dining while traveling.
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