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Comment by jmkni | Hacker News Reader

I remember seeing these in "A Clockwork Orange" but naively assumed it was a concept invented for that Universe.

I had no idea this was actually a thing.

Except of course in that the milk had drugs added to it, while the point of the real milk bars was to provide a similar atmosphere to a pub without the intoxication.

The USofA variation on the milk bar added a drug:

     Proprietors of a soda fountain in Aspen, Colorado made the Aspen Crud, a cocktail of ice cream laced with bourbon, taking advantage of laws that enabled drugstores to sell alcohol for medicinal purposes.

https://www.history.com/news/ice-cream-boom-1920s-prohibitio...

The Pathé newsreel in the video embed at the bottom of the page explicitly states that milk is tasty "when you know how to drink it" while showing a man pouring almost certainly alcoholic liquor into the milk.

> while the point of the real milk bars was to provide a similar atmosphere to a pub without the intoxication.

What does this entail that the concept of a restaurant or cafe or cafeteria does not?

More socialization, I guess?

Like the modern coffee houses.

Normally in a pub you have multiple drinks over the course of an hour or more while you socialize. It's a very different scene than restaurant where you order a meal, eat it, and leave. Cafes/coffee houses could be similar but still, while I have been known to drink several pints at a pub, I can't imagine drinking several lattes in sequence -- the caffeine would seem too much.

It's also in a lot of Nintendo games (or at least the US localizations), I always assumed it was something they made up as a cute kid-friendly alternative to having literal bars in their fictional worlds.

Zelda: Majora's Mask! This is probably localization independent since it had cows inside iirc.

But in what other games?

IIRC Mario Party 2, on the cowboy board.

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