(via Friendly’s Bankrupt - What Friendly’s Used to Be Like - Esquire)
Oh, Friendly’s! You were surely the first restaurant I ever ate at, and remain the one I have eaten at the most times: battered chicken fingers followed by an ice cream sundae rendered in the shape of a scary clown, an upside-down cone ringed with hot fudge for a hat. The first time in my life we ventured somewhere fancier — for my dad’s 40th birthday, I think — I piped up, loud and bold, ‘I’D RATHER GO TO FRIENDLY’S’ and everyone laughed and quoted it back to me until I was 28.
Oh, Friendly’s! You were where we ate dinner the night before my sister was born: parents, brother, all grandparents, in the largest and most luxurious (not very luxurious) booth. My mum was already having contractions and I was bereft of appetite, watching my favourite watermelon sherbet melt in its battered silver bowl. Maybe I was aware that this was the last meal I’d have as the youngest child. From that day forth I left watermelon sherbet behind: I moved on to mint chocolate chip.
Oh, Friendly’s! You had a branch next door to my high school: we went for ice cream after orchestra concerts and musicals, breakfast after volunteering to do some kind of good works on a Saturday morning. One friend watched my mouthfuls to ensure that she always ate less; another demonstrated how to make butter by shaking a miniature container of half and half for a very long time.
Oh, Friendly’s! We’d go to your branch on the end of Route 7 — you know, the one near the entrance to the Northway and the strip club that only served juice — for dinner when my mother was in Scotland, visiting my grandmother, who was now too infirm to cross the Atlantic to see us and eat a hot fudge sundae. One evening my father cracked a classic dad joke about his four-bean salad to your waiter — ‘I hope it’s more than four beans’ — and in return, your waiter brought back a huge extra plate of the salad. ‘I hope that’s enough beans for you,’ your waiter said, with a threatening glare, and we all felt extremely uncomfortable and were scared to return to that branch. And now you are bankrupt. Oh, Friendly’s!
