Restaurants almost universally try to bundle cheap food with cheap service and expensive food with expensive service. Often this makes sense. But when I just want food, expensive service can be slow enough to be less desirable than McDonald’s style service. But that doesn’t mean I want cheap food.
A few weeks ago I ate at the Mobil station in Lee Vining (just outside of Yosemite) with some fellow backpackers just before heading to the mountains. We each paid more than $25 a person for our dinner, and got food that looked and tasted like I would expect from a $25+ meal at a moderately fancy restaurant, yet the service was fairly close to fast food service – we ordered at a cash register, and picked our food up at a counter (although it probably took 3 or 4 minutes longer than McDonald’s does).
Why haven’t I seen any other restaurants that imitate this style? It appears to work there (it was crowded, but since that was a holiday weekend, I can’t tell how typical that was). If there were such restaurants near my home, I’d expect to eat at them more than once a month.
One comment on “Gourmet Fast Food”
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Zagats is well designed to let you look for places like this. They have separate ratings for food, service, and decor. Look for high in food and low in service. It’s hard to find many at the extreme represented by the Mobil Station, but that’s where I’d look.