About Our Drive-In

While sitting in a brainstorming session early in April 2020, the Bel Aire team asked themselves a simple question: How can we get our loyal customers out of the house and ensure they enjoy our food just like old times? Three days after that question was asked, we had our first successful Drive-In movie at the diner and nothing could have prepared us for the news coverage and outpouring of love and attention that followed.

To date, we have been interviewed, photographed or visited by news organizations from Japan, Australia, and all over the US. Articles in The New Yorker, CNN, NY Post and many more. We've been able to help our local community and other amazing charitable organizations to the tune of over $20,000. (Welcome to Chinatown, NAACP, NYPD, Mount Sinai of Queens, Queens Together, and many more) The success has led us to host a series of live, socially-distanced events which include drag shows, live music concerts, and comedy.

"At our first showing, we had an elderly couple who called me over to say thank you for holding this event. They told me the car next to them was their neighbors, and they had not seen them for eight weeks. It was beautiful they could see each other. I get goosebumps thinking about the feedback we've gotten."

" At our second showing, we had a group of young kids who were so excited to be out of the house they tired themselves out jumping around and were asleep in the back of their parents' pick up before the movie even started"

It was, and continues to be one of the greatest experiences that we have ever been part of. There were definitely tons of challenges, though. Our first few movies saw cars bac

ked up into traffic for two blocks while we struggled to park everyone safely. There was that time that our laptop got caught in the rain and was ruined. That time where we had to answer 100 phone calls from angry customers that were charged and didn't receive tickets because of our overwhelmed ticketing system. That time our app crashed in the middle of a movie. That time there was an actual crash in the middle of a movie, thankfully no one was hurt. Yikes!

But we loved every minute of it. We continue to show movies and donate a portion of all the proceeds to our community. This is a big THANK YOU to everyone who helped make out drive-in and other events so successful. We look forward to many more good times in the future!

Make sure you write those license plates for us. Greg gets lost easily --->