Fast Food Restaurants
A fast food restaurant, also known as a quick service restaurant (QSR) within the industry, 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 typically 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 Restaurants: Cuisine, Technology, Criticisms, Legal Issues, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words fast food, fast, food and/or restaurants:
“All mothers need instruction, nurturing, and an understanding mentor after the birth of a baby, but in this age of fast foods, fast tracks, and fast lanes, it doesn’t always happen. While we live in a society that provides recognition for just about every life event—from baptisms to bar mitzvahs, from wedding vows to funeral rites—the entry into parenting seems to be a solo flight, with nothing and no one to mark formally the new mom’s entry into motherhood.”
—Sally Placksin (20th century)
“Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage’s preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)