Fat Guy

You're saying best meal is only about food. I'm saying that, for me, best meal includes decor, service and all the other considerations you're saying it doesn't include. Therefore, for me, there is no difference between best meal and best restaurant.

The last time I bought eggs, about a week and a half ago, I paid $1.49 for a dozen eggs at a Food Lion down south (the organic ones, same size, on the same rack were $3.99). I thought they were superb eggs, and obviously very fresh. I found that out by poaching some, but it's also possible to use the Julian date codes on egg cartons to see when they were packed. I've found supermarket eggs at large, high-volume supermarkets to be quite fresh. The incentive from an inventory/economic perspective for producers, distributors and retailers alike is to get them to market and sell them as quickly as possible. Where I usually buy my eggs they're a little more than $1.49. I think they're $1.89 or something. The organic ones are still nearly $4. When I get the chance, I pick up some eggs at Costco, where they sell them in larger boxes than a dozen but the per-egg price works out nicely. Anyway, the point is not that I can't afford a carton of $3.99 eggs over a carton of $1.50 eggs. The point is that a person with very limited income can't make that purchasing decision every week for 30 different items -- it starts to run into the thousands of dollars. Even if Pollan is right about everything (and I suspect he is only right about some things), and even if we were to eliminate all subsidies and internalize all external costs, conventional eggs would still most likely be substantially cheaper than organic. At least with farmer's market eggs (which are not necessarily organic), you get something for your money that tastes a little better. With organic supermarket eggs, you don't even get that, I've found. But it's still an expensive way to shop, not only because the prices are higher than in supermarkets (unless you happen to live in an urban area with bad supermarkets and a great farmer's market) but also because you're getting into multiple stops for purchasing and all the resulting consumption of time and (especially if you're driving) energy. And it's not clear to me that farmer's market eggs could meet even a fraction of the demand for eggs out there in the world. The $7 price tag at the Ferry Market demonstrates that, I think.

A more apples-to-apples comparison is that if you order conventional eggs from FreshDirect, you'll pay $1.99 a dozen for New England Fresh Grade A Large Brown Eggs and $3.69 a dozen for Alderfer's Grade A Large Organic Brown Eggs. Close to double or, rather, $1.70 more per dozen. Greenmarket eggs, which may or may not be organic (I don't know if they are; I know they're not required to be), are a few cents more than that. As I said before, this isn't so much more for one product but then you have to start going down the whole line: Farmland 2% Reduced Fat Milk 1/2 gallon $2.49; Horizon Organic 2% Milk 1/2 gallon $4.39. And so on. If you start extrapolating that to the whole shopping cart, and to 52 weeks a year, you can be talking about a couple of thousand dollars a year easily. For a household with a $20,000 annual income, that's an unacceptable differential.

Thanks. I agree you've summarized the main points people in this discussion have cited as ways to define fast food. I happen to think most or all of those points are wrong. I don't blame you for that. I'm just trying to be helpful.

There's a school of thought in the restaurant business that says you should never ask because you should never need to ask. In very high-end restaurant service, where the goal is to anticipate every need before it arises, this can be the case. In the best Michelin three-star restaurants in France, and in places in the US that have service on that level (e.g., Alinea, Ducasse at the Essex House) I've rarely been asked any variant of "How is everything?" It's just a given that everything is great. Beyond that the servers are trying to make things even more great. It's hard to think of anything to ask for because they give you everything you didn't even know you needed. But outside of that top percent of a percent of restaurants, the "How is everything?" question and variants are probably appropriate. I just prefer not to be subject to some of the more tortured variants.

1. How it's ordered (order food at a counter, stand and wait for it, then leave with it) A place like Fuddruckers uses pagers. You go sit down, and when your food is ready they page you to come get it. 2. How it's made: High volume pre-prepared food, quickly assembled when ordered and quickly given to the customer This however doesn't distinguish fast food from non-fast-food restaurants like Denny's. It also doesn't account for fast-food deli chains like Subway and Quizno's, or for pizza. 3. Limited menu items If anything the trend in QSR has been towards larger menus. 4. Cheap food but good value Value is a pretty subjective notion, though. Some people wouldn't agree that McDonald's is a good value. Yet it is fast food, almost defining the category. 5. No waitstaff/table service Pizza Hut has both. 6. Possibly having drive-through service This does tend to be a fast-food thing, though of course in urban areas like Manhattan the fast-food places rarely have drive-thrus. 7. Fast Food is made for quick consumption by the restaurant Maybe but no quicker than the average diner breakfast. 8. Fast Food is quickly consumed by the customer. In a Fast Food restaurant, the customer doesn't linger. The food is consumed quickly and then they leave. That's how I feel at Daniel. 9. No eating utensils needed/Fast Food can be eaten out-of-hand - "A burger difficult to pick up and eat is not likely to be a FF burger" Lots of fast-food places now serve salads. 10. Fast Food isn't determined by the food itself but by the restaurant selling it - the restaurant determines whether the food can be labeled as Fast Food through the food production/assembly, how it is sold and how it is consumed That's what some here have suggested but it hardly seems to be common understanding. 11. Fast Food is always served ready to carry (in a bag for "to go" orders - on a tray for dining in) Pizza. 12. Fast Food is portable without general loss of quality It tends to be portable and it tends to lose quality. Ever try an hour-old McDonald's Value Meal? 13. Generally speaking, Fast Food comes from a chain restaurant I'd say this is completely false. There are chains and non-chains selling fast food. And most fast-food chains, of course, start out as a single establishment. 14. Fast Food is paid for up front when ordering Usually, though not at Pizza Hut. Moreover, ordering and paying up front is common at buffets and other non-fast-food restaurants. 15. Fast Food is generally not cooked to order There are plenty of examples where it is, ranging from pizza to subs. There will be exceptions, of course. Does anything not really belong? Is something still missing? There are so many exceptions that it's very difficult to build a definition from those criteria, which would in any event form a very complex definition. That's pne part of why I've argued repeatedly that the term "fast food" isn't really worth defining. Or, if we are going to define it, let's just look to an industry definition and say QSR equals fast food and be done with it.

I'd be willing to wager that Alice Waters has had extensive media coaching. She is a highly sought-after public speaker and television guest. She is represented by a big-deal lecture agent. I believe her speaking fees are quite high. In addition, she is a totally polished, totally on-message public speaker and interviewee. That doesn't come naturally to anyone. You need to learn it, either through formal coaching sessions or through a lot of bits of coaching and advice over time.

The backlash against Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and others of their ilk, such as it is, has occurred during the recent recession. I think that's too much of a coincidence to ignore. Right now anybody who has a message on the order of "pay more, eat less" (I think Pollan actually said those words or something close) is not as likely to be tolerated as he or she would have been two years ago. My own consumer behavior and feelings track these macroeconomic changes. A couple of years ago, for example, I was buying organic eggs. It just didn't seem like a big deal to me to pay more for them. I figured I have a young child, I should do what I can. Now, I go grocery shopping and I see organic eggs for $3.99 a dozen when the conventional ones are $1.50, and I think, you know what, I'm not buying the organic ones until I'm presented with compelling evidence that they're better -- and as far as I know no such evidence exists. They don't taste better either. (Usually they taste worse simply because they're not as fresh.) You have to escalate to even more expensive Greenmarket eggs before you get flavor improvement that's only evident in some preparations anyway. And I'm not exactly poor. I'm not all that well off but if I really needed to pay $3.99 for eggs instead of $1.50, I could. But real working-class people with families to feed don't have that luxury. When you multiply that kind of purchasing decision by the 30 products someone might pick up when shopping for a family, you're talking about the difference between $45 and $120 for a grocery bill. Week after week that can add up to several thousand dollars a year. We have something like 1/5 American households with household incomes under $20,000, if I'm reading the chart correctly. Of course Alice Waters and Michael Pollan know all this, and it's an oversimplification of their positions to say that they're just asking poor people to spend more on food. It also radically overstates Alice Waters's significance and impact to say that fast-food chains have added healthy-menu options because of her, or really that any major changes have occurred because of her. She's one person in a large movement that would have been just fine without her, albeit perhaps a little different at the margins. She no more deserves the credit for that movement's accomplishments than she does the blame for its failings.

This is a standard airline knife policy, in this case from Northwest but most are similar as I understand it:

That's sometimes how it works. You'll find that if you go into most red-roof pizza huts for lunch it's a self-service buffet designed for people who want to be in and out quickly. Although you can get a pizza made to order at lunchtime in my experience (probably a dozen visits over the years) most people get the buffet. At dinnertime a red-roof Pizza Hut follows a table-service model for eat-in customers, though of course not for takeout and delivery customers. Certainly Pizza Hut, by providing table service to a subset of its customers, is an outlier in the fast-food world. As I mentioned before, on the QSR 50 it's the only chain, I think, that provides table service. But it's still, I think, a fast-food outlier rather than not-a-fast-food restaurant chain. The way I understand it, Pizza Hut (and all throughout all my posts, when I speak of Pizza Hut I mean the red-roof stores as opposed to the Express and other outlets that are more clearly fast food, or the Bistro locations that are more clearly not) is the original fast-food pizza chain concept. It brought pizza into the fast-food category, at the slow end of the category on account of the inherent time it takes to make and serve whole pizzas but with many of the other trappings of fast-food chains: the standardization, etc. Later chains like Domino's are more fast-foodish because they've eliminated eat-in, and therefore table service, altogether. That's why QSR thinks Pizza Hut is an example of a fast food restaurant, and I imagine that's how the average fast-food consumer sees it. Pizza Hut doesn't, at least this is my understanding, really compete with sit-down restaurants like Olive Garden and TGI Friday's. It competes with McDonald's and the other fast-food places. Again, both the industry and common-usage examples seem pretty decisive here, I think. From Wikipedia on "Fast Food": So we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether Pizza Hut meets various abstract criteria for fast foodness, but the issue seems already to have been decided by the relevant decisionmakers: the industry and the general public.

Every time I've been to White Castle, which I think of as the quintessential fast-food chain, my burgers have been cooked pretty much to order. They don't seem to be organized enough to have lots of them ready, and they don't use the warming trays that McDonald's and most places now use. They cook the burgers on the griddle -- they cook quickly because they're so thin. If you order cheeseburgers they add the cheese at the end. They put the patties on the buns, they put the finished burgers in those paper half-boxes, they call your number and you get served about 5-10 minutes after you ordered restaurant.

Just some other examples of real-world usage: "Fast-food chain Pizza Hut launches new brand" "Fast Food News: Pizza Hut's 580-calorie slice" "Pizza Hut case study: repositioning fast food as healthy"

Not sure if this matters but the Pizza Hut website says: "At Pizza Hut, we take great pride and care to provide you with the best food and dining experience in the quick-service restaurant business."

This was 9pm and the joint was slammed. If the oven wasn't hot enough then, it's never hot enough (which may very well be the case). My guess about the reason is, however, that if you cook every pizza for one minute less you can sell a hundred more pizzas by the end of the night. (Raises hand.)

Not by me it can't. It's not just that the industry seems to agree. It's also that I think normal people see Pizza Hut, Domino's, Little Caesar's, Papa Johns, Papa Murphy's and CiCi's (all of which are in the QSR 50) as fast food options. And I, as an abnormal person, see them that way too.

For me, it was at Charlie Trotter's, when our captain asked, "How are we feeling?"

A few recent pizza experiences reminded me of how significant the problem of undercooking is in the pizza world, at least in North America but also in a few European places where I've had pizza. I recently went to Lombardi's, which is one of the better (though not nearly the best) New York City pizzerias. My pie -- and every pie I could see -- was just not cooked enough. This made the whole thing flabby. This has happened to me three other times in the past couple of months. At the same time, I was recently at Nick's, which is by most accounts a lesser pizzeria than Lombardi's (though still a pretty good one), and I ordered my pie "well done." What came out was a pie so much better than the Lombardi's pie, and so much better than the previous pie I'd had at Nick's, that I'm now going to order all my pizzas well-done unless I have specific reason to believe that a given place cooks the pizza right in the first place.

Now who's talking semantics? In any event, I think this all gets us back to the meta-questions about what a definition is. In a lot of instances what happens is you have a formal definition and a common-language definition and you have to argue about which to use. But I think in this case you have both QSR magazine representing the formal end and common-language which pretty clearly says Pizza Hut is one of the fast-food chains, and both are in agreement. So the fact that whole-pie pizza is not fast food according to one person's proposed taxonomy doesn't really change the reality that both the industry source and the common person driving along a highway strip looking for fast food consider Pizza Hut to be a fast-food restaurant. I also think the whole "cooked to order" notion is problematic because it's another terrifically blurry line. What happens at Subway or any other sandwich chain? What about Taco Bell or Chipotle? Or what about a fancy restaurant? In all those cases there are some pre-cooked ingredients (at Subway the deli meats are already "cooked" and at a fancy restaurant the stocks and many other things are already cooked) and they're combined into a final product. Moreover at Subway these days you have all sorts of cooking (as in heating of food) going on beyond the standard cold-sandwich assembly.

Of course. Had I not dined in several great restaurants outside my region in the past 18 months I'd have declined to participate. But since I had been to Alinea and a bunch of other terrific places during those 18 months I was fine with doing it. It only took 10 minutes and was no skin off my back.

Anyone got an answer to my question? Surely those of you who were on the voting panel must have some idea. ← It's not really a "panel." They just send out survey invitations to a whole lot of people -- how they're chosen I have no idea, maybe one of the press releases says how -- and those people log on to a web interface where they complete a survey in about 10 minutes. Those of us who do it aren't given a ton of information. I think I've pasted, above, all the information I was given.

None. I'm a judge/respondent/whatever for the US:East region. The point is that I'm supposed to have dined well within that region. They also ask me to include two restaurants from outside my region -- this helps establish some basis for comparison, as a statistical matter. But to say the respondents for region X haven't been to region Y is beside the point.

That distinction doesn't make sense to me. The quality of a "meal" also includes "food, service, ambience, decor etc. etc." How do I determine "best restaurant" other than by asking where I've had my "best meals"? How do I designate something as "best restaurant" if I've had anything other than my "best meals" there? On the general issue of the validity of the list, of course all such lists are flawed in various ways. This one, overall, is probably better than most. It relies on a relatively knowledgeable group of people, which is a better approach than Zagat's random selection. And the system of three restaurants in the region, two restaurants outside the region of each respondent provided a mathematically somewhat valid means of comparing across regions. This system doesn't require 8,000 people to dine at El Bulli. It requires a handful to eat there and rank El Bulli ahead of other restaurants. Then when all the numbers are crunched El Bulli comes out on top. Still, as with any group effort of this kind, the outcome represents a lowest common denominator for the group.

I think Fuddrucker's qualifies as fast food, and they grind fresh on the premises. Huh. Does it make a difference? Are their burgers any good? ← Fuddruckers does a better job than most of the chains but they still do a lot to ruin the burgers after a promising start to the process. The grind is, predictably, way too fine. They compress the patties too much. They overcook them, of course. But I'm sure they're better than they'd be if they started with frozen pucks. They also bake buns on premises at Fuddruckers, and they're not all that special either. The general idea behind Fuddruckers a good one but in practice it gets messed up in various small ways that add up.

So what would you say about the pizza chains, where you're always going to wait a bit for your pizza? Or a place like Fuddruckers, where the burgers are made to order, you go away from the counter, they call your number (or flash your pager) and you come back up for the food? I don't think these are just semantic (in the pejorative sense) issues. Rather, I think that when you look at the problems with every offered definition of "fast food" you wind up exposing the fundamental conceptual problems with the category. Even just in the burger realm, which is how this topic started, we can't get people to agree that the high-quality, single-establishment version of White Castle (White Manna) serves a fast-food burger, or is a fast-food restaurant, or whatever. Again, when people say what fast food means to them, that's not the same as a definition. When somebody says we could define fast food a certain way, that doesn't make that the definition of fast food. And the definitions we find from authoritative sources, e.g., Websters "of, relating to, or specializing in food that can be prepared and served quickly" -- those definitions aren't all that helpful.

Is a pizza at Pizza Hut fast food? It takes 20 minutes. It doesn't take 20 minutes to cook a White Manna burger. How many minutes does it take? Five or six? What is the number of minutes it needs to take before food crosses from fast to not fast? Does it count if some of those minutes are spent waiting on line, waiting behind other cars at the drive-thru, waiting because the griddle is too small so it takes 20 minutes before anyone can even start cooking your food? When Hardee's releases a new burger and there are hour-long lines to get one, is it no longer fast food? Is an omelet fast food? Are the thousand other things that cook in a minute fast food? Does the term "fast food" contain self-descriptive answers to these questions?