From time to time I become the lucky recipient of donated restaurant images. The most recent one is shown above, a charming small photo of a drive-in where the sign looks almost as large as the building.

The question was, where was it? It took quite a bit of sleuthing to find the answer, with searches of on-line resource by both the donor and me.

Luckily for me, the donor also became a researcher and helped nail down the location of the SIP-n-NIP in the photo.

Turns out that Sip-n-Nip was quite a popular name, sometimes with dashes, sometimes with apostrophes, or both. There was a SIP-‘N’-Nip in Tampa FL and a Sip-‘n-Nip in Baton Rouge LA, and St. Petersburg FL, not to mention similarly named drive-ins in Great Bend KS, Rayville LA, Delhi LA, Detroit MI, and Riverside CA. No doubt there were others. Plus, the name is still in use.

There were also Nip-n-Sips all over the country, but when Nip came first that usually meant it was a bar or liquor store.

Drive-in movies were popping up about the same time that the Sip-n-Nip eateries came along. The two went together, as families and teens with cars topped off movie nights with a hamburger and milkshake.

Eventually it became clear that the location shown in the small photo was Dearborn MI, on the corner of Telegraph and Sheridan roads. It was opened in the mid-1940s by brothers Stanley and Theodore Romanuk. [Above: another view of the drive-in, possibly later]

The Romanuk family also ran a cocktail lounge called the Blue Castle.

According to a presentation of the Dearborn Historical Museum, the Dearborn SIP-n-NIP was very popular with school children who stopped there on their way home from school. In the evening families came by for a casual dinner. As the evening wore on it became a gathering place for teens. [Above: Another view, possibly during a vintage car show?]

The Sip-n-Nip closed around 1960, with the widening of Telegraph Road.

That same year, in July, a waitress was accidentally killed at a Sip-n-Nip in Lincoln Park MI. The proprietor of the second Sip-n-Nip on 2031 Dix was Theordore Romanuk. I was not able to discover when that Sip-n-Nip opened or how long it stayed in business.

For more on the Dearborn Sip-n-Nip, see the presentation on youtube called Dearborn Then and Now: Sip n’ Nip.

© Jan Whitaker, 2026