Dairy Queen Grill & Chill (Hastings)
1025 Michigan 43It’s been quite a while since I’ve been to Hastings.
I had to meet a co-worker in the Delton area late last week. We ended up in Hastings around lunch time before we had to head back to Grand Rapids to finish the project we were working on.
We were in separate cars so I told her I was going to grab lunch and I’d meet her back at the office.
I needed something I could pick up quickly and I kind of had fast food on the brain anyway. I didn’t want to spend a lot and I needed it to be quick.
On the way out of town, I spotted a fast food joint that immediately brings back memories of my childhood growing up in East Central Illinois.
Dairy Queen Grill & Chill is on M-43 and Cook Road just outside of Hastings on the west side of town in Rutland Charter Township. The restaurant looks like the typical fast food joint with a small building footprint but a large parking lot that makes accessing the drive through easy.
I guess I should back up really quickly and talk about my past with DQ. I grew up in a town of 700 people. The Dairy Queen near the highway was the only fast food place in town so it was a pretty common week night meal and it was always a place the grandparents would take us for a treat when they were watching us. A lot of my friends worked at the Dairy Queen and when I got my driver’s license, the Dairy Queen was one of the first places I drove on my own to get dinner with my own money. That Dairy Queen closed when I was in high school and moved to the next town north which just got a new gas station off the highway. The building has set empty ever since. My home town went without a fast food place for a couple of decades until Subway moved in to the gas station about a mile off the highway. Needless to say, the burger brings back instant memories. We can still get ice cream at the Dairy Queens around Kalamazoo (Portage, Stadium Drive, Lovers Lane) but none of them have the full DQ menu like this one in Hastings.
Anyway, back to this blog about Hastings.
I needed to use the restroom so I decided to go in.
The restaurant is set up like any typical fast food restaurant. There’s an order area with a queue right as you walk in the doors.
There are then seating areas on either side of the kitchen. Again, nothing out of the ordinary and exactly what you’d expect to find in a newer fast food restaurant.
I got in line to order but there was a group of older gentlemen in front of me who were complaining about prices and kept changing their order. It was taking a while so I decided to just go get back in the car and hit the drive thru thinking it would be quicker to do it that way.
There was no one in line at the speaker when I pulled up to the drive thru. I put in an order for the Bacon Two Cheese Stackburger Combo with fries and a Coke. I thought long and hard about adding an order of cheese curds to the order and even a Blizzard but I didn’t do it and just got my burger and fries. The cost was a little over $15 and it was ready not long after I got to the pick up window.
I started with the fries right away because I’m always leery about eating fast food burgers in the car. I’ve had enough drip on me when I go for them right away. I feel like it’s best to let them rest a bit and solidify a little more.
The fries were simple fast food fries but I was really surprised by how many there were. They would have benefited from some salt or some BBQ sauce but I knew what I was getting when I ordered them and was fine with what they were.
The Bacon Two Cheese Stackburger comes as a single, double, or triple patty sandwich topped with American and White Cheddar cheeses, applewood smoked bacon, tomato, onion, lettuce, pickles, ketchup and mayo. I did the triple stack and that first bite just brought me back to my small hometown in Illinois. I didn’t ask for anything to be left off although I did take off the tomato and onion. There was such a small amount of ketchup and mayo on there that it actually enhanced the flavor of the burger instead of detracting from it. In the end, it’s still just a fast food burger but this is the fast food burger I was looking for when I saw the DQ sign on my way out of town.
Dairy Queen is what it is. There’s some nostalgia for me with the food. I always like the ice cream (even though I didn’t get it this time). Kalamazoo has some Dairy Queens but none of them have this full menu. The Stadium Drive and Lovers Lane locations have food but the options are pretty limited. I’ve been wanting to stop by Stadium Drive for a while to check out their burgers hoping they’d be what I remembered DQ to be but in the mean time, this really hit the nostalgia button for me.
SW Michigan Dining 