Restaurant In A Car Dealership Food Review (Part 3): The Horseless Carriage/Galpin Ford/North Hills

The Horseless Carriage

Address: 15505 Roscoe Blvd., North Hills

My automotive-culinary tour ends, for now*, at The Horseless Carriage. It is a part of the Galpin Motors (Ford, Honda, Saturn, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Lincoln, Mercury, Volvo, Mazda, Lotus) complex.

The Horseless Carriage is a small, narrow, old fashioned diner. All the seat covers and menu covers are teal. All the booths were occupied so we sat at the counter.

The menu was quite extensive and the dinners were about as expensive as at F-1 Bistro and Bistro 33 ($13 to $24). Because it was such a hot day and because we had a huge breakfast, I was not able to eat a full meal. So I ordered a cup of their soup of the day (chicken rice for $4.95) and an order of onion rings ($4.95). I figured that if they can’t get these two simple things right, it probably speaks volumes about the rest of the repertoire.

I knew that the entire soup did not come out of a can because the rice was still hard. The chicken, carrots, and celery though were cut in that telltale way from a large, mechanized chopper from some depressing, anonymous factory somewhere in the Central Valley. The liquid part of the soup was strange. You know how normal chicken soup has that film of almost florescent yellow oil? Well this soup I had contained a blood orange film of oil that clung to the side of the bowl like rain on a dirty windshield.

I waited what seemed like 20 minutes for my onion rings. I even heard my waitress yell at the cooks, asking for my onion rings. When they finally arrived, they were scaldingly hot and the batter was a little too thick. Other than that, they tasted pretty good.

The restaurant is separate from any showrooms. All you see outside are random new and used cars for sale. Nothing to write home about. Parking was hard to find. We ended up parking down the street.

My conclusions after my restaurants-in-car-dealerships tour? Go to F-1 Bistro as a destination. East at Bistro 33 only if your car’s repair job is going to take a while. And if you have to be at Galpin Motors, eat before you go.

*A Lexus dealership in Escondido (near San Diego) will be opening this month. It will contain a restaurant serving French and Italian food.