Fitz's

The Pooj wants to arm wrestle for some reason...

(BevMo Pasadena, April 2011)

A couple months ago, my sister asked if we all wanted to meet her in St. Louis for a weekend (heh, meet me in St. Louis…nevermind…). While I’m sure there’s much more to see in St. Louis than the Arch and the Wainwright Building, which I had already seen before, I couldn’t really think of anything else I really wanted to do there (well, except get some barbecued pork products…). More to the point, I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do there that would have appealed to the rest of my travelling contingent, since I doubt anyone else would have wanted to spend the entire weekend on a tour of all of Adler & Sullivan’s buildings… Or eating barbecued pork products... Now if I knew then that one can watch Fitz’s Root Beer being bottled on a refurbished 1940s bottling line whilst enjoying a burger, I may have been more tempted to make the trip after all (and force everyone to go on the architectural tour with me…).

Fitz’s Drive-In first opened in 1947 in the St. Louis suburb of Richmond Heights. Car-hops served up burgers and house-made root beer until its owner retired and the restaurant closed its doors in 1970. Enterprising locals started re-bottling Fitz’s secret recipe brew back in 1985, later opening up Fitz’s American Grill & Bottling Works in 1993 inside a renovated art deco bank building near Washington University. To keep Fitz’s rooted in its past tradition, the owners carted down an old bottling line from Wisconsin, fixed it up, and installed it in the restaurant where it operates today. Definitely worth another root beer field trip, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, I would pretty much be going just to see the bottling line and try the burgers, since Fitz’s Root Beer is not particularly spectacular. It’s heavy on the vanilla and pretty sweet, but pretty bland when it comes to the herbs. There’s initially a mild wintergreen birch flavor that fades as you get further down the bottle. One thing that doesn’t fade is the vanilla – it lingers a while in the aftertaste. Since we also had another bottle of Olde Brooklyn open, I tried them side by side, resulting in the Olde Brooklyn tasting even more cola-ish to the point of gummy-cola-bottle-ish. Fitz’s tasted more birch-y afterward by comparison, but as soon as my taste buds forgot about New York, St. Louis lost much of its foliage as well, if you catch my drift.

Hopefully the frosty mugs of root beer and gourmet burgers at Fitz’s American Grill & Bottling Works are worth the trip, because right now Fitz’s Root Beer is nothing to leave home for. That’ll get you a 3.