Wonderful Things #2: A&W Root Beer

The way we were...

Thinking of current halfway stops like the Big Apple reminds me of our old family halfway pit stop between Kingston and Montreal, the A&W at Cornwall. A&W root beer is still a wonderfully cheap thrill--the simple genius of chilling the mugs is still genius, and root beet itself is a terribly folksy thing. It's a bit of Americana, originally flavoured from the root of the sassafras tree. There are other "small beers" worthy of mention: birch beer, sarsaparilla, burdock, ginger ale. In Quebec, we had spruce beer. But root beer is the best known of them all.

And I love the retro theme A&W kept in their outlets, as if just to please me. They’ve frozen everything in the 50s and 60s, the era when I first started visiting A&W. Again, the lack of pretention is part of the beauty of the thing. Incidentally, I’m speaking of A&W Canada, which is apparently completely independent of A&W USA. Your results may vary.

Truro, Nova Scotia, A&W