Stewart's Root Beer in Rosedale sells expensive cold food and watered down root beer!
Balti-Hole
not, they serve luke-warm expensive food at best. The serving sizes are
meager with a small cup of fries starting at almost $3.00. At nearly
two
bucks for a hot dog, they should serve all-beef foot-long hotdogs. And
I've
never seen any icy mugs full of root beer, how about paper cups filled
with
watered-down root beer! This place gets a "F" in my book.
Stick with the A&W root beer at the corner market in aluminum cans!
Icy mugs and steamburgers
by Julie Scharper, Baltimore Sun reporter
Originally published September 30, 2006
Leonard Martin passed an icy mug through the window of Stewart's Root
Beer to a customer waiting in a car, then called in the food order: six
hot dogs.
Since March, Martin and his wife, Dorie, have cooked chili dogs, Old
Bay wings and cheese fries seven days a week at their restaurant, a
half-century-old institution on Pulaski Highway in Rosedale. Now, they
are about to scrub down the kitchen, hang plastic over the windows and
head down to Texas for a few months.
But before they close for the season, they will offer one final treat.
They will give away free root beer to anyone who stops by tomorrow.
It's a sign of appreciation for their customers, many of whom have been
coming to the restaurant for decades.
"I've got to get my fix before he closes for the winter," said Ken
Inks, 61, a cookie distributor from Dundalk, as he dug into a chili
dog. He also ordered a steamburger, a sandwich resembling a sloppy joe
without the sauce.
When Inks was a teenager, Stewart's was a drive-in where servers hooked
trays of food to car windows. "When I got my first car, it was the
first place I took it on a Saturday night," he said.
Although most customers now come inside to eat, neither the menu -
which emphasizes meat, squirtable cheese and sugary drinks - nor the
decor has changed much over the years. The wood-panel walls are trimmed
in tangerine. Outside, the letters that spell Stewart's Root Beer are
faded to peach and curled at the edges.
The front windows feature paintings of a red 1957 Chevy and a purple
1939 Plymouth. Classic car lovers gather at the restaurant a few times
a year.
Martin bought the restaurant in 1969, 20 years after it opened on
Pulaski Highway. In 1975, he moved it a few hundred yards from its
original location and reopened as a sit-down restaurant.
Icy mugs, sweet soda
Leonard fills icy mugs with Stewart's toothachingly sweet sodas in
flavors such as Cherries n' Cream and Key Lime. He hands mugs of soda
to customers to enjoy while they wait for their food at the
drive-through window.
Dorie, a petite woman with a ponytail perched high on her head, uses a
2-foot-long whisk to stir pots of steamburger meat.
They greet most of their customers by name. "I know when they pull up
what to drop in the kitchen," Dorie said. "A lot of them never change.
They get the same thing every time."
Jim Wolfkill, 78, and his wife, Mildred, 77, have been coming to
Stewart's for root beer and hot dogs ever since their children played
baseball. "Forty years ago, the Little Leaguers all used to come here
after all the games," said Mildred Wolfkill, munching on a chicken
sandwich.
Leonard Martin said he likes to keep the restaurant old-fashioned. He
said he doesn't plan to sell it anytime soon. "You sell it, and they
would change every damn thing," he said. "They'd serve food on a kaiser
roll."
The first root beer stand in the Stewart's chain was started in 1924 by
an Ohio schoolteacher named Frank Stewart, according to the company's
Web site.
Martin's customers say that they're glad that the restaurant, located
across the busy highway from the El-Rich Motel and a few doors down
from Psychic Readings by Sister Bess, doesn't change.
Steve Blake, 43, remembers coming to Stewart's as a special treat when
he was a kid. Now, he eats there regularly with co-workers from the
Friendship Dental Laboratory.
Asked what brings her back to Stewart's, dental technician Gloria
Woods, 44, pointed emphatically at her meal with her plastic fork. "The
cheese fries," she said.