Fat Guy

I'm pretty sure I was one of them this year. A long time ago I got an email from some food-world big-shot asking me to vote in the S. Pellegrino awards thing. I didn't even realize that was the same thing as the old Restaurant Magazine awards. I guess it got rebranded at some point? Anyway, I was assigned to a region, in my case something like "US: East." I then went to a web interface where I was able to select the 5 best meals I'd had in the past 18 months, 3 from my region and 2 from outside my region. This are the instructions I was given, if you're curious:

Really? Who is serving fast food burgers from meat that is ground fresh on premises? The most prominent chain example is Fuddruckers, which makes a really big deal out of on-premises grinding. In a typical Fuddruckers there's a "butcher shop" behind a glass wall, where you can look in and see the grinding equipment. Beyond that, I've glimpsed grinders in the back in fast-food places in LA and Chicago, places of the ___-A-Burger genre. Those are either single establishments or small chains. Yes, exactly. Which is why it makes more sense to speak of a "fast food restaurant" rather than "fast food." ← I'm not sure it makes sense to speak of either, but at least a "fast food restaurant" is something that can be defined non-nonsensically, whereas the term "fast food" alone is so diffuse it doesn't really mean anything. People keep saying "to me it means X" but of course that's not the same as a definition, especially when each person is saying a different thing. I think when we speak of "fast food restaurants" at least the disagreement tends to be at the margins: I think White Manna is fast food, QSR magazine thinks Pizza Hut (where they have table service and it takes longer to get your food than at White Manna) is fast food, etc. But there is at least some major conceptual overlap when it comes to McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, KFC -- I think we all sort of agree that those are fast food restaurants. Another thing to keep in mind, on a separate point, as Holly keeps reminding us, is that the big fast food chains have changed a lot. White Castle, for example, used to make its hamburgers almost exactly the way White Manna does today. Nobody thought it wasn't fast food back then. But now that White Castle and the other big chains have lowered the standard such that everything starts as frozen, people are saying, oh, White Manna, that's not fast food. To extend Holly's point, the response to that is, no, today's White Castle is not fast food. It's just crap. White Manna is real fast food. They're kickin' it old school. People barely recognize fast food anymore because the chains have ruined it.

Another example on that point: PDT and Crif Dogs in New York City. Crif Dogs is a fast-food order-and-pay-at-the-counter place serving hot dogs and fast-food-style burgers. Next door is PDT, a high-end cocktail bar offering food from Crif Dogs. So if you get a Crif burger at Crif is it fast food but it becomes not fast food if you get it served to you at PDT by a server and pay the tab after?

I was just looking at the QSR 50, which is the ranking of the top 50 quick-service restaurants tracked by QSR magazine. I think 49 of them met your standard, but one didn't: QSR magazine considers Pizza Hut to be a QSR aka fast food restaurant, even though it has a certain level of table service.

My wife and I now joke, every time we pass a Chinese restaurant, "Hey! I wonder if that's one of the Top 100 Chinese restaurants in the USA!" We were just road tripping in North Carolina and got a lot of mileage out of that one. The more remote and unusual the restaurant is, the funnier it gets. Once in a while, I see a restaurant I remember from the manuscript, but with so many entries and with so much overlap in Chinese-restaurant names (not to mention creeping senility) it's hard to keep track. The book is almost ready to go to press, by the way. I'm supposed to get the final page proofs tomorrow.

There are no waiters, there are no tables, the burgers are served on paper plates. You're getting food from a counter; just a counter you happen to be sitting at, unless you're taking out from the restaurant as many people do. In the time you're savoring the surroundings and ambiance, on a busy day they produce hundreds of little burgers on that little grill. It's fast food from the glory days of fast food burgers, before the chains switched to frozen patties. Based on what I've heard about White Castle from the pre-war days, they made their hamburgers pretty much exactly as White Manna still does today. They were both fast food then and they're both fast food now, as far as I'm concerned. The New York Times referred to the other one, the one with one "n," as "a fast food landmark." I don't think it's on the line.

I've never timed it but it's pretty fast -- as fast as a cooked-to-order burger can be. The wait is mostly because the place is so busy so a lot of people's fast-food burgers get made ahead of yours. Other than that it takes about as long to cook a White Manna burger as it takes to cook a White Castle burger. In a 2001 post Jason Perlow called White Manna "the primordial essence of American fast food." I couldn't agree more.

It takes just as long to get served at White Castle, which sucks by comparison. To me, White Manna is very much a fast-food establishment serving fast food. It's one of the purest fast-food experiences I've had.

Another facet of the fast-food-burger question is how to categorize the places that par-cook the big burgers. There are plenty of diner-type establishments in New York City (and elsewhere) that serve 7, 8 or 9 ounce burgers. They've always got a few of them par-cooked at the back of the grill, so when you order one you get it in about 3 minutes instead of the 12 or more it would really take to cook it from raw. A lot of people would consider these diners to be not fast food. Yet, the burgers are always degraded by this treatment. Whereas several of the better fast-food places are serving burgers cooked from raw and in some cases even ground on premises.

I don't get the "outside the US" part of that statement. The tapas trend is quite strong in the US. Tapas aren't as widely available or as good outside of Spain as in Spain, but there are plenty of tapas, not to mention tapas-like small-plates menus with non-Spanish influences. Whether those constitute fast food is another question. In general, the whole US/non-US distinction seems specious to me. Yes, the US is the home of mega-corporate junk fast food. But this kind of food is now popular in most every nation where the people can afford to eat it, and the big growth areas are outside the US. Conversely, there is a tremendous quantity of traditional US cuisine that is pretty fast and pretty good. The selection here is probably more diverse than in any country in the world except maybe China. You can go around region by region and name hundreds of fast-food-type items, from New England lobster rolls to many regional styles of barbecue to New York deli sandwiches to Texas chili to . . . you get the idea. Most everywhere I go in the US I find wonderful "road food" alongside the chains. I also like some of the food at the chains. And that's not even getting into all the ethnic "fast food" out there, though the ethnic/non-ethnic distinction is not particularly clear in a nation of immigrants.

The name implies that fast food has a generally bad reputation with Ferran Adria. It also has a bad reputation with anybody involved with Slow Food, and among gourmets in general, and among affluent, educated elites the world over. Fast food does not necessarily, however, have a generally bad reputation with the people who subsist on it. You might be surprised to find that there are plenty of people out there -- hard-working, decent people with limited free time trying to feed their families and stay sane -- who think those who are down on fast food are paternalistic, condescending and out-of-touch. They are grateful for the convenience that the chains offer. To get back to the issue of what makes a burger a fast-food burger, I think the answer is that the question doesn't make sense. I agree with Sam that the designation is better applied to restaurants of a certain type, and covers whatever they serve. Although I don't think the term has much use at all, in any event.

Funny we were walking in Bologna near Piazza Maggiore and we were stunned to come across a McDonald's. Who could eat there? Hopefully not the locals. ← This is a common misconception about Europe, which as of last summer (the last time I checked in on this issue) was actually a larger source of revenue for McDonald's than the US. I highly recommend this article from Business Week for some basic factual background. To wit: On fast food in Europe in general, this is a decent backgrounder.

Such as McDonald's?

No grinding here. I go with a rustic texture: roughly chopped potatoes, medium-diced onions and medium dice of everything else.

I remember junk food being spoken about too, but as a larger term encompassing more than just food from restaurants. Cheetos and Doritos, those were junk food.

Arancini Pane e Panelle Baccalà fritto Gyro Falafel Choripan ← I guess I have two thoughts upon seeing that list of examples: First, all of those things are readily available in the US. And like a hamburger they can all be high- or low-quality. Gyros and falafel, in particular, can range from sublime to junk. Second, a lot of those are deep-fried foods consisting mostly of carbohydrates. A diet consisting purely of falafel is probably just as bad as a diet of french fries. As in toxicity, it all comes down to dosage. The occasional serving of falafel, just like the occasional meal at McDonald's, is surely harmless. Eat it every day and you might have trouble. The problem with fast food -- whether it's McDonald's or falafel -- isn't its existence or periodic consumption. The problem is when people start living on the stuff and it crowds other foods out of the ecosystem. That's the health problem, at least. There are also economic and cultural problems with the mega chains that would exist even if they all sold salad.

Was it ever a largely positive descriptor? I'm not old enough to remember the early uses of the term in the 1950s and 1960s, but when I was a kid in the 1970s it was certainly not a positive descriptor among my peers' parents -- even though at the time most fast food was pretty tasty, as opposed to now. I searched for New York Times mentions in the 1950s and 1960s and they all seemed pretty neutral. There was no "gee whiz, isn't this futuristic fast-food stuff great! It's so much better than home-cooked food!" The reputation of fast food probably hit a low with the publication of Fast Food Nation, but as an overall trend I wonder if fast food hasn't of late been fighting back against its bad reputation. The whole fast-casual segment, where you have billions of dollars invested in the proposition that it's possible to have high-quality fast food, seems to be a statement that fast food can be good food. There have always been countless examples of good, fast food. Of course having a discussion about fast food's reputation presupposes meaningful agreement about what the term means. I don't think such agreement exists.

What examples are you thinking of?

I agree that the term makes little sense without a food-service context. According to this blogger, who seems to have done his homework, it dates to the 1950s: Most of the major chains serve inferior food today to what they served when I was a kid. I'm not sure that reality bears on the definition of fast food, though.

For most small quantities of leftover meat and some vegetable items, hash is probably my favorite. It's a leftover dish that often exceeds the original item. If I make brisket, short ribs or something like that for dinner, I often look forward to the next morning's hash more than I do to the dish itself. Sometimes I throw a small amount of something random-seeming into a hash and it really elevates the dish. Like Chris's grilled balsamic red onions -- those could be an inspired addition to a hash.

I think of "fast food" as a category so large as to be unhelpful in the present day (it may have made more sense in the 1950s). To focus it a little, there are a couple of terms in use in the trade press that seem more workable to me. One is the designation "quick-service restaurant," or QSR. These are restaurants where there is either no table service or minimal table service (e.g., someone brings you stuff but there's not a full-on table-service experience). There's also the relatively new term "fast-casual," which applies to places that try to provide higher quality. I would place Shake Shack, Stand, et al. in that category. It may also be useful to distinguish between national or large regional chains on the one hand, and single-establishment restaurants or mini chains on the other. In general, based on what I've seen over time, there is a drop in quality when the transition from small to large chain occurs. It doesn't have to be that way, but it usually works out that way. It will be interesting to watch Five Guys complete that transition. Colloquially, in the restaurant context (as opposed to Cheetos), I think of "junk food" as the subcategory of "fast food" that tends to be the lowest quality, most unhealthful, most vilified.

This is probably the number one unaddressed organizational challenge in my home kitchen. I'm eager to hear of good solutions.

Just to be clear, Padma Lakshmi's career was well established prior to her brief marriage to Salman Rushdie. She had already been on the cover of Cosmo, already appeared on Star Trek, etc. Most of those who found the marriage scandalous found it so because he's 61 and she's 38 (though each was younger when they married). I'm not quite sure that marrying a man 20+ years your senior is news, or that such a marriage ending in divorce is a major surprise. It happens all the time. In any event, I'm not sure what all that has to do with the Hardee's commercial, which I think we have demonstrated, resoundingly, is not an example of shilling.

Certainly there are cheaper turkeys than Ayrshire turkeys -- the cheaper-than-Ayrshire category would include most turkeys for sale in the US. But like I said, there's a big difference between a single humane practice, such as pasture raising, and Certified Humane, which governs all aspects of handling from cradle to grave and involves inspections and rigorous standards. I doubt it alone can triple the cost of a product, but it does create a large additional expense. There's more information about the Certified Humane requirements here. In addition, the Ayrshire product is USDA Organic, which creates another set of costs. I don't know much about the breeds of turkeys and what it costs to raise each one, but there are different breeds in question as well. I didn't taste an Ayrshire turkey. I will say that the Ayrshire chicken I tried was amazingly good. Whether that, combined with the humane-and-organic certifications, makes it worth the markup over other chickens is a matter of personal opinion.

Most of the cost difference is probably attributable to the fact that Ayrshire is producing heritage-breed turkeys and has to incur all the expenses associated with being Certified Humane (as opposed to simply saying "we use humane practices") and certified USDA Organic. All that stuff, especially when done on a small, non-industrial scale, gets expensive. I don't think they're gouging; I just think that's the real cost of producing that level of product. It's my major concern about the approach: a switch to this sort of farming would send the cost of meat skyrocketing. For some people, that's not a big deal: many of us could just eat 1/4 as much meat and be healthier; others have enough money that a 400% increase in meat prices wouldn't mean much. But for the economically disadvantaged, the current industrial agriculture regime -- distasteful as many of its practices are -- provides a way for all but the absolute poorest Americans to put meat on the table at will. For me, the ideal farming operation is probably something like Murray's. There you have humanely raised chicken that doesn't wind up costing so much as to be a luxury item. It tastes better than factory-farmed chicken, and everything about the way it's raised and handled is better. And production is large enough that it's a respectable model for feeding a nation without needing to transform the US into an agrarian society.