The Blizzard With the White Center

There are officially about 6,000 Dairy Queen franchises in the world, and I swear about 5,000 of them are unofficially in southern Illinois. When I lived in St. Louis and crossed the Mississippi River en route to a strip club or dirt track (both of which can also be found in abundance in the Land of Lincoln's southern tip)—I couldn't drive past a massive, toxic relic of heavy industry's mid-20th-century heyday without passing at least a quartet of DQ's on the other side of the road. Honest to God—unofficially.

Location Info

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Dairy Queen

10256 16th Ave. S.W.
Seattle, WA 98106

Category: Restaurant > American

Region: White Center

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DAIRY QUEEN 10256 16th Ave. S.W., 767-4657. WHITE CENTER

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In Washington state, there are officially about 100 Dairy Queens, and in Seattle proper there are officially none, cementing our fair city's status as officially hostile to national fast-food chains. Such an attitude is positively righteous in many respects, but when it comes to DQ deprivation, it sucks—especially for transplanted Midwesterners who in prior lives became addicted to a frosty concoction known as the Blizzard.

The Blizzard—a paper soda cup filled with bits of various popular brands of candy (Butterfinger, Heath, Oreo, et al.) blended with ice cream—hit the illuminated menus at Dairy Queens everywhere in 1985 and became an overnight success. The treat even has its own fan club. Known pretty much only to Blizzheads is that the wizards inside the freezer at DQ (Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns the chain outright) actually trademarked the name "Blizzard" way back in '52, waiting until the peak of go-go Reagan decadence to hawk its after-dinner crack to the masses.

Going down, the treat is, in a word, perfection. Many an ass has increased exponentially in size on account of Blizzard consumption, yet scientific research has proven that asses fattened by Blizzards are at least 75 percent happier than those fattened by, say, peanut brittle.

Despite Seattle's Blizzard blackout, a few blocks south of the city limits sits the White Center Dairy Queen. This particular franchise is a DQ Brazier, which means they sell non-dessert food. And while the non-dessert food at this Brazier is no worse than the likes of Wendy's or Burger King, I wouldn't recommend it—better to eat a head of lettuce at home and blow a day's worth of calories on the Blizz. Nobody really shows up for the opening act when there's a superstar on the bill, after all.

mseely@seattleweekly.com