Growing up in Illinois and Indiana, I went to Dairy Queen after softball games, choir concerts, and debate tournaments. The luckiest kids got Dairy Queen birthday cakes, with their crunchy middle layer nestled between two bricks of cold, sweet ice cream. Later, I lived in New York City, where the Midwestern soft-serve chain had never ventured. I missed it nearly as much as I missed my parents, or driving through cornfields, or driving at all. When I moved to Iowa three years ago, my first visit to Dairy Queen felt like a religious pilgrimage. My order, these days, is simple: a chocolate-dipped vanilla cone. There is nothing quite like the crust of a DQ dipped cone—the liquid that transforms instantly into a hard shell, snapping when you press your tongue against it, in perfect contrast to the smooth chill of vanilla soft serve. I even appreciate the vaguely chemical scrim that seems to coat the roof of your mouth for hours after you’ve sucked the last morsel from the papery grid at the bottom of the cone.
Dairy Queen’s long and conspicuous absence from Manhattan ended this morning, with the opening of a two-story, twenty-five-hundred-square-foot Dairy Queen Chill & Grill—a version of the restaurant that serves both ice cream treats and food, like burgers and chicken strips—on West Fourteenth Street, near Union Square. (While this is the first DQ in Manhattan, it’s not the first in New York City; a location opened in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal last year.) For transplants, tourists, and, perhaps, native New Yorkers to whom Dairy Queen has long been an exotic unknown (like tuna casserole, or mowing a lawn), the new restaurant may be a welcome development. Still, it’s hard to celebrate, without ambivalence, the arrival of another strip-mall staple in New York City.
The first Dairy Queen opened in Joliet, Illinois, in 1940; by the early fifties, some locations had started serving savory food in addition to frozen treats. DQ franchises have since spread to forty-nine states and more than twenty countries; there are more than six thousand locations worldwide. The company has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway since 1998.
Dean Peters, a spokesman, told me that the chain stayed out of New York for so long because of high costs and other operating challenges. The company finally found a franchisee it thought capable, LSQ Foods, which Peters described as having “the vision,” the “financial resources,” and the “operational resources” not only to successfully manage the new location but to continue to expand in the city.
The spectre of a growing league of New York City Dairy Queens may alarm advocates for local, independent businesses. According to a report by the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank, the number of national retailers in New York City grew each year between 2008, when the study was first conducted, and 2013 (albeit at a slower rate last year than in any previous year). Fifteen retailers had at least a hundred locations in the city last year; Dunkin’ Donuts became the first to surpass five hundred.
Jonathan Bowles, the think tank’s executive director, told me that he doesn’t believe chains are always bad for the city; New Yorkers like choices, including, sometimes, the option to shop at the Gap or Home Depot. But, he said, “there are some neighborhoods in Manhattan where I think we’ve kind of reached a tipping point, where some great New York businesses are either shutting down or they can’t afford to be in those neighborhoods anymore.” Neighborhoods overrun by chains have lost “what’s unique about New York,” he said.
Of course, one Dairy Queen, or even a hundred Dairy Queens, won’t disrupt New York’s economy or reconfigure its character, and part of the city’s identity has always been a tendency to transform. But when businesses belong to absent, anonymous owners instead of local entrepreneurs, those businesses are less invested in and accountable to the community. Several studies have shown that independent businesses offer more benefit to the local economy than national chains. And the question of preserving local character isn’t simply emotional or aesthetic. If wide swaths of New York look like any suburban shopping center, what reason do bright weirdos in small towns have to dream of moving there? If the parts that aren’t a strip mall are a playground for the very rich, can it still function as a laboratory for cultural innovation by people from diverse backgrounds?
Bowles doesn’t count the area around Union Square among the neighborhoods that chains have robbed of their vitality, but it seems reasonable for someone who cares about the economic diversity and distinctive character of New York City to be wary of yet another national business setting up shop—and with plans to expand. (“We’ve heard, like I’ve said, nothing but positive things from people who want a Dairy Queen, who have been asking for a Dairy Queen for so long,” Peters, the Dairy Queen spokesman, told me.)
Years ago, not long after we moved to New York, some high-school friends and I stopped at the Olive Garden in Secaucus, New Jersey, on our way home from IKEA. We would never have gone to the Olive Garden in Times Square. We were busy reinventing ourselves, and a chain restaurant in a tourist trap felt like everything we’d left Indiana to escape, an affront to our new determination to enjoy wine and eat a greater variety of lettuce. But an Olive Garden in a suburb, next to a mall, offered something different: the setting for an exercise in nostalgia. There we’d be far enough from our new lives to safely acknowledge how Midwestern we still were. Even in Secaucus, Olive Garden was a little disappointing, the endless breadsticks less thrilling than we remembered, the entrées not tasty enough to enjoy as kitsch, the idea of eating-as-kitsch difficult to justify now that we lived in a city where eating for actual pleasure was so easy. Still, we loved the familiar comfort it offered. Part of me is pleased that New Yorkers no longer have to live without Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Blizzards; I have struck an item from the list of cons on my “Should I Move Back to New York?” worksheet. Still, I can’t contemplate a Dairy Queen on Fourteenth Street without wondering if New York could, someday, become a place that feels too much like home.
Photograph by Visions of America/UIG via Getty.
Elizabeth Weiss
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