El's Drive-In — Restaurant in Morehead City

We watched a YouTube video that was released by UNC TV about El’s Drive in. They talked about their famous shrimp burgers with their delicious cole slaw and “special” sauce. They said you just had to get some of their homemade onion rings to go with the burger. Two ladies talked about working there as teenagers and their job was to made the onion rings. On Mother’s Day we decided to make 137 mile one way trip to taste this sensation for ourselves. I decided that I was going to try the oyster burger. Well, when we placed our order they said they were out of oysters so I ordered a BLT and the “homemade” onion rings. My husband was excited to try the shrimp burger so he order a large one. The wait time was fine since the parking lot was full and of course we were thinking this food is going to be fantastic! We finally got our order BUT we didn’t know it was cash only. The carhop gave us our food and let us go across the street to the AMT (this is the reason I am giving 2 stars instead of 1). We drove back over and paid for our food. Yay! Now we are finally ready to taste the food. My BLT was approximately the size of my open palm but it was okay. The “special” sauce on the shrimp burger was ketchup! The slaw was good but that was about it. The shrimp was tasteless and over powered by the ketchup. My husband said if he knew what he knows now he would have order a slaw burger! The “homemade” onion rings were the same onion rings you get out of the frozen food section at Walmart! Well, we ended up giving most of them to the seagulls. At least they liked them, but of course they will eat anything. This was our first and last time...

My rating is for the poor service (and that is being nice, more like awful). The food is okay, slightly overpriced which is to be expected at a restaurant that close to the beach and we waited over an hour for our food, again to be expected since it was busy. The waitress (drive-in attendant) was the most rude waitress I’ve ever had. I waited tables for 4 years and I would’ve never considered talking to a customer this way. She was rude, making side comments, and was generally just unpleasant. We walked to the front because we’d been parked for about 15-20 minutes without being helped. She asked if we’d been helped and we said no and she asked what car are we in. I told her the Nissan, and pointed at it (less than twenty feet away and the only Nissan in the parking lot) and she responded with “wow that’s helpful” (an exact quote). From then on, she was incredibly rude and short. She cut me off in the middle of my order to ask if we had cash, when she came with our food nearly an hour later, she handed us our food an ran off before we had time to check it. We had 4 people in our group and 3 of us were missing an item. When she came back we asked for our checks to be split up, which we didn’t get a chance to tell her earlier since she ran away as quickly as possible, and she made out that she would rather one person pay instead of fixing her mistake. She basically acted as if it was annoying for us to be there. Absolutely terrible service and for the price, cookout has...

Giving one star due to lack of service. Hours of operation clearly list 10pm as closing time. We arrived around/before 8. The server came out to deliver food to a car that was already there. She looked at us twice but did not acknowledge us otherwise. We continued to wait for service, then the lights to the establishment shut off. Confused, we got out of our car and went to the door to see that they had displayed their closed sign -- a shock.

A few minutes later, we caught another employee on his way to the dumpster. He did not voluntarily acknowledge us either but we asked him when they closed. His reply: "normally 9 or 10 but tonight we close at 8." No explanation for the discrepancy. No apology. Nothing. We told him that we had been outside. The server could have at least told us as a courtesy if they couldn't serve us. Otherwise it appears that they pick and choose their customers and arbitrarily decide their hours of operation depending on who is in the car. While this may not be the case, the establishment certainly needs to work on handling situations such as these unless you truly are biased.

If they couldn't serve us due to something unforeseen (equipment malfunction, staff illness, etc.) then the intelligent thing would have been to simply offer a quick verbal explanation to customers who appeared DURING NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS while your lights were still on, who watched you serve other customers, and who saw you look at us more than once as...