Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,11
like the grilled filet mignon—a premium cut of meat served alongside decadences such as red-wine, shallot confit, miniblocks of Barolo-herb butter, and hillocks of carrot purée.
Earlier in the evening, Buffett had requested a Cherry Coke, which the Four Seasons obviously didn’t stock. But when somebody worth over $60 billion orders off menu, you don’t refuse. You send one of your staff scurrying across the white marble floor, past the wall with the largest Pablo Picasso canvas in the United States on it, out of the iconic Seagram Building onto Park Avenue, and into the midtown Manhattan night toward the nearest bodega to scrounge one up. Buffett got his Cherry Coke, but when he requested a cup of Dairy Queen soft-serve ice cream after his steak that night, he found himself out of luck. Unlike Buffett’s hometown of Omaha, New York City had no DQs yet. The opening of the first branch was still months away. And so, he had to settle for a dessert of chocolate chip cookies. Even the hallowed hospitality artisans of the Four Seasons couldn’t make it happen.
There’s something inspired and almost cunning about a man who holds the single biggest stake in American Express turning down a portfolio of lavish mousses, fancy soufflés, and brown-butter parsnip cakes to ask for a paper cup of $3 soft serve. But Buffett, who is said to favor breakfasts of Utz Potato Stix and Coca-Cola, is also a rare kind of billionaire. He dresses like a state senator from rural Maine, drives his own car to work, and eats like an eleven-year-old, the age he was when he purchased his first stocks. That Warren Buffett has only sent one email in his entire life occasionally appears as a clue in crossword puzzles. Simply because he has managed to amass a massive fortune while also retaining a basic filament of gravitas and humanity, he’s called colorful and eccentric.
The irresistible pull of the Buffett folklore is part of why his miniature act of culinary defiance became tabloid fodder. But it also has to do with the contrast between the Four Seasons—the enlightened, urbane, modernist cathedral that Americanized fine dining—and Dairy Queen—the lowly, small-town, and déclassé institution. Page Six reported that Buffett’s off-menu order “caused a scene.” The Four Seasons even humblebragged about its failure to accommodate Buffett’s special request on its Facebook page.
Buffett was ten years old when the first Dairy Queen stand opened in 1940 in Joliet, an Illinois town that’s perhaps best known for its prison. The origin story of DQ is one of those old-fashioned American tales of aw-shucks innovation: Dairy Queen was born of a dairy farmer’s disruptive quest for better ice cream.
“J. F. McCullough (better known to us as ‘Grandpa McCullough’) was an old time Dairy Man who always had the idea of selling soft ice cream to the public, not knowing too much about the soft cream business or where to start,” begins a company minibiography written by Sherman “Sherb” Noble, who would later open the first Dairy Queen with McCullough and his son. In the beginning, the McCulloughs sold hard ice cream from their family farm in the tiny town of Green River, Illinois. They would churn the product and, when it was about twenty-three degrees cold, pour it into large containers. Next, they would deep-freeze the ice cream at subzero temperatures so it could easily be shipped off to shops, where it would be served at around zero degrees. But having sampled the ice cream in a warmer state, the McCulloughs were convinced that it tasted better that way. What they lacked was the advanced technology to build a batch freezer that would make a semifrozen enterprise commercially possible.
Before plunging into an extravagant investment (especially in the late 1930s), the McCulloughs conducted a little market research. The duo called on Noble, a friend and client of theirs, who agreed to offer their soft serve at his store in Kankakee, Illinois, on an August afternoon. All you can eat for a dime. “The reaction was very good, we served over sixteen hundred servings in two hours,” Noble recounted. “We had ice cream all up and down the block, even had them eating ice cream in the corner tavern down the street, which was very unusual for this place.”
The trio fiddled with the butterfat levels and adjusted the serving temperature and found their way into the right kind of freezer. They christened their venture Dairy Queen, reportedly in homage to the cow, which Grandpa McCullough called