Miners has held it down in Yakima, the Palm Springs of Washington, since 1948.

Walking into Miner’s Drive-In Restaurant at the sweet, confusing age of 12 years old, you are smacked by all the noise. There are fryers blitzing breaded chicken, big pools of oil bubbling parades of fries. Orders called out and passed along between staff who, in uniforms of red and black, run food out the drive-thru window and through dining rooms stuffed with teenagers talking, laughing, and eating like this is the last time they’ll ever taste a hamburger. Strawberry milkshakes are slurped. Stained foil is balled up by greasy fingers and thrown into trash cans.

The interior is all shiny brown wood and stained glass lampshades, little pictures embossed on those lampshades of tomatoes and grapes on the vine cut into portraiture. The logo, on plastic cups and encircled by neon on the wall, is soft orange with big blocky text — think Wall Drug, think Old West. The food is food you already know, the eternal food of America. The titanic Big Miner Burgers and chili cheese fries are meaty, oozing, and weighty.

Miner’s, in the arid Central Washington city of Yakima, where I grew up, is maybe the most historic burger joint east of the Cascades. It’s shorthand for fast-food splendor in the shrub steppe ecology of Central and Eastern Washington. I’ve eaten at Miner’s more times than I can count. So has everyone else from rural Washington.

It is to Yakima what the cheeseburger chain Dick’s is to the Seattle area, a restaurant that’s been around so long that it has become retro. You could call it nostalgic except that implies it’s out-of-date, when in fact it is very much an anchor of present-day Yakima. Kids today eat there just like I did and their kids probably will too. Miner’s holds fast to what works: indulgent burgers, no-frills aesthetics, and unwavering commitment to keeping things the same.

The restaurant — which is actually a drive-thru, not a drive-in — was opened on April 9, 1948 by Ed and Irene Miner with the help of their 16-year-old son, Lee. Miner’s is on First Street and the edge of Yakima’s sprawling Valley Mall. If you haven’t been to Yakima, and you probably haven’t, the city has just under 100,000 residents. There’s a big sign declaring it “the Palm Springs of Washington” just north on Highway 97 that was put up by a guy named Gary in 1987 to get people from Seattle to visit. When he was asked by a reporter in 2013 what Palm Springs has in common with Yakima, he said, “We have a lot of sunshine over here.” (The reporter also spoke with some Seattleites about this one-man tourism campaign, and one said, “I’ve been to Palm Springs, it looks nothing like Yakima.”)

Mostly the city is known for its abundance of hops and fruit. Miner’s, too, is a Yakima institution, visible on the main drag in bright yellow and red. According to manager David Miner, grandson of Ed and Irene, the business has barely changed since the early days. This quintessential Americana burger joint is a relic, a holdover icon of the most upper-left state, the way its beer and apples are.

Miner’s was the first drive-thru restaurant in Yakima. The response to the advent of drive-thru fast food hitting the city was immediate and euphoric. Cars have slammed the business ever since. Local lore goes that the McDonald brothers visited the drive-thru in its infancy and took inspiration for their operations, though McDonald’s did open eight years before Miner’s, in 1940. (It’s probably not true, but, like Mulder, Washingtonians want to believe.) These days, there are seven huge Pepsi-branded menus in the drive-thru alone; staff come take orders while cars rack up.

In the mid-1950s, Ed Miner noticed a Richland high school team circling, looking for a place to eat. When they pulled in, Grandpa Miner told them the coach would eat for free. Word got around, and in short order teams planned their games around trips to Miner’s. Coaches still eat free at Miner’s to this day. The burger joint now sponsors plenty of teams and sporting events. Thanks to its super late operating hours — 2 a.m. most nights and 3:30 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays — heading there after football games is a time-tested legacy for teens, too.

The drive-thru, and a small roped-off patch of grass and trees known as “Miner’s Park,” are what remain from Miner’s opening days. It wasn’t until 1997 that the restaurant added its first dining room. In 2000 it added a second, the same year a salad bar station joined the mix.

The burgers are no longer 25 cents like they were when Miner’s opened. But this remains the kind of restaurant where families grow up and where employees stay in place for decades. Head manager Al Louis, for instance, has worked at Miner’s for 30 years since he was a 17-year-old dishwasher. And Miner says he often eats the cost of rising expenses to avoid unsettling people: “We don’t want to scare customers away. People come here expecting things to stay the same.”

Things did change, unavoidably and everywhere, at the onset of the COVID era. Supply chain issues made it difficult to source everything from beef to foil hamburger bags. The drive-thru line was beyond crowded; there were rarely fewer than 20 to 30 cars sprawling into the street. Despite those delays and hardships, the well-oiled machine that is Miner’s kept on chugging.

Today, Miner’s looks and feels just like it did when I was a 12-year-old wing signing my papers as “Kobe ‘The Storm’ Bryant.” The chili cheese fries are as titanic as ever. There’s still magic in blasting through a heap of heartburn-inducing fries and teriyaki burgers in the car before hitting the mall. It’s like the same kids are decamping the same buses after the same Ellensburg versus Union Gap games. The only thing that seems like it’s changed is me; I eat like a rabbit when I’m not eating for work, and I no longer have the metabolism required to eat at Miner’s. A new crop of tweens has taken over where I left off. The cosmic ballet goes on.

Miner isn’t too concerned about the future of his restaurant, nor the food industry at large. His grandparents are in their 90s now, but he’ll only be 35 in June. He can run the restaurant for a long time without changing anything. Nothing needs to change. “We’re busier than ever,” Miner says. “So why change something that’s not broke?”

Miner’s Drive-In Restaurant (2415 South 1st Street, Yakima) is open every day from 8:30 a.m. to 2 a.m., and until 3:30 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.