DRIVE-TO DRIVE-INS
These Central Florida landmarks offer nostalgia served with a side of fries
‘Ialways order my burgers with extra ketchup and extra pickles,” Susan Hamed tells me.
Same went back in 1969, when she asked her older sister to take her to the Moonlight Drive-In to have one. She may have been hungry, but that was beside the point. Her mission was focused on the nice-looking boy from one of her classes at Titusville High School, Raymond. It was his parents’ place. She was 16 years old.
“You know how teenagers are,” she tells me with a laugh.
“So, we go there and sit at this booth. I know the exact one. The west-south booth. And we’re sitting there, watching him cook and all of a sudden, things start flying at me and I was like ’What in the world…?!’ ”
Pickles.
“He was tossing pickles at me from across the dining room.”
These are her first memories of the place she calls “the Moonlight,” so-named by Raymond Hamed’s father, Mack, who bought the place in 1964 and christened it for another focused, successfully executed mission: the Apollo program.
Susan didn’t know it then, but she’d spend most of her life at the Moonlight with Raymond — raising a family who’d work alongside them, locking up on occasion and joining customers on the south side of the building to watch spectacular launches “that rattled the plateglass windows,” she tells me.
The Hameds sold the place in 2019 but it took some time to find the right buyers, people who would preserve this town landmark where couples such as the Hameds and older pop in regularly to mark an anniversary in the place they had their first date, or where they’d bring their long-since-grown children for a burger.
“It’s nostalgia,” she says. “It’s gone from grandparents to parents and it just keeps getting passed down and the ones it means the most to are those who are still bringing their youngsters there.”
When Susan was a girl, there were four drive-ins in the area. The Moonlight is the only one left.
Central Florida has a handful, though. Joints with carhops or curb service, places that have seen the era of the muscle car come and go and (if you’re into the new ones) come again.
They’re all within an hour or so’s drive from Orlando if you’re feeling nostalgic. Or want to give your own kids or grandkids a history lesson they’ll sit for. Because it comes with chicken tenders and a banana milkshake.
“That was my order when I was little,” says Shawn Landry, 35, who with wife Jessie became the Moonlight Drive-In’s new steward in October 2019. “We’d usually come here after the beach.”
He and Jessie had their first Moonlight memory in their teens, when they started dating.
The Landrys owned six Bagel 13 loca
tions before selling them in 2018, then spun up a new concept in Titusville, Third Culture Kitchen.
“We went from having six restaurants to one, so we got bored pretty quickly,” he chuckles. “Then we found out the Moonlight was for sale.”
The Landrys’ restaurant experience and hometown connections were a good fit with the Hameds, with whom they hit it off right away.
“They felt comfortable with us and we felt good about it,” says Landry. “So we bought it.”
The Moonlight was a little place called Fransen’s for a few years before the first set of Hameds took out the 99-year lease that would see all of its growth. Raymond and Susan took it over in 1977, then bought the property outright 10 years later.
In Winter Haven, the place that’s been Dino’s Drive-In since 1968 started its life as a Dog n Suds before John Patsourakis’ uncle bought the place and named it for his son.
Through good economies and bad, folks have rolled up regularly for a budget-friendly bite. There’s a surprisingly large menu of homemade fare from hand-breaded fried chicken and catfish to cole slaw. Burgers are prepared to order. Nothing sits.
“We were slammed with our own Winter Haven customers before,” says Cindy Patsourakis, co-owner. “But when COVID happened — our food is all carryout — we ended up on a Polk County Facebook app and the whole county showed up. So many people weren’t working. We were at it like slaves.”
In their prime, she and her husband logged 80-100 hours a week.
“We’re old now,” she chuckles. “But it will continue to be run by family.”
Carhop Leegha Farr, 21, has been working here since she was in high school. Her dad, a local, has been coming here since he was a kid. She loves the gig and calls a few customers by name as she sets the tray, loaded with fries and a hot dog bathed in homemade chili, on the window of my car.
She’s one of many who’ve started young and stayed on.
“We’ve got one employee who’s worked here 17 years right now,” says Patsourakis, who adds that at this point they know everyone in town. “I’ve watched kids grow up, then gone to their baby showers. I’ve been to hospitals when customers have gotten sick. Our employees, our customers, are family.”
And the family has never been busier.
“The drive-in was a great model back then, and it still works today, especially during COVID,” says Landry. “It was the best business to be in when all that happened. We closed the dining room for a little while, but the carhops kept working. Everyone did.”
They’ve streamlined the menu since taking over and done a little modernizing by putting tech in the hands of the carhops.
“With the tablets, nothing’s written down and orders go straight to the kitchen, which cuts down a lot of time … but even though we’re fast food, we’re fresh-fast.”
This means flamebroiled burgers and literally everything cooked to order.
“We have no heat lamps or warming cabinets,” says Landry. “We cook your fries and everything else when you order them.”
The ranch is made from scratch at the Moonlight. The handspun milkshakes have real fruit. Ask and they’ll add malt. They make Raymond Hamed’s original-recipe cheesesteak. And chili.
“The cinnamon fluff for the sweet potato fries is made in-house, too,” says Landry. “I’d definitely suggest you try that.”
It’s a newer add for a place that’s been open nearly 60 years, but the folks who’ve been coming here since then will find the burgers haven’t changed, right down to the tomatoes, which Landry says were serious business for his predecessor.
“We were very adamant with our staff that customers here were used to getting a red, ripe, handsliced tomato on their burgers,” he said.
This is likely a comfort for the Hameds, who’ve been a part of the Moonlight for four generations.
“We get a lot of tourists, sure,” says Landry, “but it’s still mostly Titusville natives. This place is a landmark. Everyone has some sort of a Moonlight story.”