A fast food restaurant, also known as a quick service restaurant (QSR) within the industry itself, is a specific type of restaurant characterized both by its fast food cuisine and by minimal table service. Food served in fast food restaurants typically caters to a "meat-sweet diet" and is offered from a limited menu; is cooked in bulk in advance and kept hot; is finished and packaged to order; and is usually available ready to take away, though seating may be provided. Fast food restaurants are usually part of a restaurant chain or franchise operation, which provisions standardized ingredients and/or partially prepared foods and supplies to each restaurant through controlled supply channels. The term "fast food" was recognized in a dictionary by Merriam–Webster in 1951.
Arguably the first fast food restaurants originated in the United States with A&W in 1916 and White Castle in 1921. Today, American-founded fast food chains such as McDonald's and KFC are multinational corporations with outlets across the globe.
Variations on the fast food restaurant concept include fast casual restaurants and catering trucks. Fast casual restaurants have higher sit-in ratios, and customers can sit and have their orders brought to them. Catering trucks often park just outside worksites and are popular with factory workers.
Read more about Fast Food Restaurant: History, Cuisine, Technology, Criticisms, Legal Issues
Famous quotes containing the words fast, food and/or restaurant:
“The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Lead bullets flattened by human teeth have been found on the camp site. Soldiers who had been caught stealing food from nearby farms customarily chewed on a bullet as the lash was laid on their bare backs.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“A restaurant with candles and flowers evokes more reveries than the Isle of Bali does.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)