Only around Baltimore could an establishment be unironically named “Drug City” and contain such a wondrous array of wares, services, history, nostalgia, and surprises in one location.
Drug City opened on North Point Road in Dundalk in 1954, and in its current form houses a pharmacy, a post office with Western Union service, an extensive liquor store, an old-time soda shop called “The Fountain,” a card and gift shop, medical equipment & furniture section, a whiskey tasting room, all in addition to the many aisles filled with typical drugstore items for sale. The website offers virtual 360 tours, but they do not do justice to the many intangibles that make Drug City the institution it is.
Michael Jonczak began working at Drug City in 2019 and became store manager in August 2024. He told Baltimore Fishbowl that the store has always been the kind of place where people can go for anything they might need.
“Where The Fountain used to be, it used to be tanning salon,” Jonczak said. “They had it as a video rental area for a while. Pagers, tag and titles, we’ve always had an eclectic variety of just about anything that you might need.”
When the store first opened, it did not have the footprint it does now. Jonczak explained it has expanded over the years, which customers can notice by the floors which are not level in some places, and where additions were made.
“A BEAST IN THE LIQUOR INDUSTRY”
Jonczak told Fishbowl that the liquor department used to consist of nothing more than a 30-pack and maybe a bottle of wine. When Dr. George Fotis (“Doc George) bought Drug City in 2016, that changed. At the time, Jonczak was manager of a different liquor store and began hearing about “this Drug City and this George guy” who was “doing wonders in the whiskey world.”
He visited the store with a friend, introduced himself to Fotis who brought him up to the speakeasy/tasting room above the pharmacy, and a connection was made. By the time Jonczak began working at Drug City soon after, the store’s transformation into a destination liquor store was well underway.
“People travel just to come here for our liquor collection,” Jonczak said. “We have people that come from Virginia, they come from Pennsylvania, the D.C. area just to shop for whiskey in our store.”
Their marketing approach is different from most, however, in that not everyone has a chance to purchase some of the more exclusive brand releases. They want the specialty bottles to be both more affordable and available to their hometown community.
Jonczak described a two-tiered system involving the more rare, allocated whiskeys and other liquors, and the store’s loyalty/member program which earns the customer points for every dollar they spend anywhere in the store. Every dollar earns them one penny/point the member can redeem for credit toward the partial cost of a bottle.
“So, like for Blanton’s, for example, once you get the $15 of loyalty points, we take $15 off the cost of the Blanton’s, the person pays the rest, plus taxes, and that allows them to be able to get the Blanton’s, [which is] the really high end, rare stuff,” Jonczak explained.
He said they would love to sell to anybody, but when exclusive brands release rare and limited bottles, this approach made most sense to them. While most businesses would raise the price on a rare, allocated liquor, Drug City uses the loyalty points system to reserve the bottles for their regular customer base and even make them more affordable.
Loyalty to their customers and neighborhood, combined with their continuously expanding variety and massive selection has lifted Drug City to what Jonczak describes as “quite a beast in the liquor industry.”
FROM CABLES TO CABLES
The variety of products and services cannot be overlooked at Drug City. It isn’t everywhere a customer can purchase lift chairs for help with mobility, Swarovski crystal figurines for a gift, Simply Southern-brand cozy sweaters, and decent perfume like Calvin Klein’s Eternity. Apart from the typical drug store inventory of phone cables, if one needs to send an actual cable via Western Union, simply walk to the back of the store to the post office.
The post office sends packages, accepts bill payments and rolled coins, provides notary services and money orders, and more.
Furthermore, how many drug stores have a whiskey tasting room upstairs? Referred to by Jonczak as the speakeasy, it’s where private groups like bourbon clubs can host small events and parties.
HUNGRY FOR NOSTALGIA
Don’t miss The Fountain Soda Shop if you’re hankering for a meal or a treat. Open seven days per week, this place is tucked away on the side of the store through unassuming white doors and a black and white striped awning with a bench underneath. The old-time lunch counter is anything but old-fashioned, though, unless someone is in the mood for an actual old fashioned — as in, the classic cocktail.
The Fountain channels the olden days with homemade flavored sodas (23 flavors, plus seven sugar-free flavors), but one can also scan the QR code on the menu for a “secret soda menu.” Those are not for children. They include boozy milkshakes made with Taharka Ice Cream. Unlike the soda shops of old, The Fountain serves classic cocktails and whiskey.
Still, the spot feels like a family place. There is even a rotary phone attached to the wall.
Chuck Jacobs, who manages The Fountain, grew up in Dundalk and remembers Drug City as always having been a community anchor.
“It’s great because it definitely has your mom and dad vibes, your grandparent vibes,” Jacobs told Fishbowl. “And then we have the kids that come in. They love the milkshakes and the sodas, and they like to sit here and watch us make them. And then, you know, the older folks come in, they have their lunch and little dessert, catch up with everybody.”
They even partner with local elementary schools to help with attendance issues. If a child attends school for a certain number of days per quarter, they get a certificate to get a free meal at The Fountain, which includes a soda and a scoop of ice cream.
There are menu items one would expect at a nostalgic soda shop, like grilled cheese, burgers, and deli sandwiches, but be prepared for some hard choices if you like chips. The Fountain offers no fewer than 30 flavors of potato chips, including standards, like barbeque and salt and vinegar. If you feel like branching out, though, try the Funyun, garlic jalapeño, FryDust, and Jollof flavors among the many others.
How did they come up with the idea for The Fountain? After it stopped operating as a tanning salon, it had become a storeroom, and Fotis wanted to do something different with the space. Jonczak credits Fotis with the idea of turning it into an old-time soda fountain.
“We just started doing a lot of research on what the old drinks were like, the Black Cow, the egg cream and all that, because we wanted to be more of that old school feel where somebody that was 80 walked in, they would feel like they were back at 10 years old again,” Jonczak said.
About that…
THE EGG CREAM
This reporter might not be 80, but an egg cream, if properly made, can indeed make her feel like she is 10 years old again.
Having grown up in 1970s Brooklyn, New York, she is a purist when it comes to her egg creams. They do not need to be served by an elderly man in a white apron chomping on a cigar while she sits on a stool reading a 25¢ comic book, but that is what the taste should evoke, and proper ingredients and preparation are critical.
The egg cream’s origins are elusive, but generally believed to be from the 1880s, either from the lower East Side in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Containing neither eggs nor cream, one theory attributes the recipe to candy shop owner Louis Auster, who took the recipe to his grave. Another is that Yiddish theater pioneer Boris Thomashevsky asked a New York City soda shop to reproduce something he’d had in Paris. The French “chocolate et crème” morphed into “chocolate egg cream.” Still others say the name comes from an Americanization of the Yiddish “echt keem,” which means “pure sweetness.”
Regardless, it was a staple of Jewish life in New York City for over a century. Many outside New York have tried to reproduce it, few have succeeded.
Jacobs paid proper homage to the drink’s New York roots and promised they did plenty of research when they opened The Fountain nearly five years ago. They came upon a recipe for an “egg cream soda,” and decided to try it.
“Turned out to be very successful!” Jacobs told Fishbowl. “And the funny thing is, Drug City sells snowballs. And of course, one of the snowball flavors we have is egg custard. So, when people come in and order an egg cream soda, the first thing I say is, ‘Do you know what it is?’ Because most people don’t expect a chocolate milk soda. And I always try to say, ‘If Yoohoo could be a soda, this would be egg cream soda.’”
That is not a bad analogy, though my go-to was always (and remains) the vanilla egg cream.
Yours truly did not pay close attention to how her egg creams got made when she was seven, so for this writing, relied on sources like “Food & Wine,” two kids she grew up with, and a Radio Hall of Fame DJ from New York for input on proper egg-cream assembling procedure.
Everyone consulted agreed:
- Syrup must be Fox’s U-Bet brand;
- Milk must be whole;
- Seltzer must come from spritzer, not bottle.
Amelia Schwartz, of “Food and Wine,” insists the seltzer must be ice-cold. Mitch, pal since 3rd grade, is strict on milk-syrup-seltzer order. Jordan, pal since 9th grade and former soda jerk at Jahn’s, omits milk completely and clearly is an outlier for this. Bruce Morrow, known by millions of radio fans as Cousin Brucie, is an egg cream aficionado. He prefers the milk-seltzer-syrup order and follows Schwartz’s technique for careful assembling and stirring.
Every source confirmed the drink must be consumed immediately or the foam fizzles away.
Looking to test Jacobs’ egg cream credibility, I asked exactly how they make them at the Fountain.
“Well, we do two pumps of milk, and then I do the seltzer, and then once you get the milk up to the top, and then you do one pump of chocolate, and then you stir it real fast, and the top of it gets frothy, like your quote-unquote, egg cream,” Jacobs said, sounding pretty confident in his process.
The Fountain’s egg creams might lack the mandated U-Bet syrup, and opinions on the method of assembly are clearly varied and passionate.
It had been more than 40 years since I’d sat on a stool at a soda counter in Brooklyn sipping a vanilla egg cream when I visited The Fountain in Drug City. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger, garlic parmesan potato chips, and a vanilla egg cream. When it arrived, I took a sip through the straw and sighed.
The only thing missing was the comic book.
