Maybe this is an Ohio idea, but there used a delineation between standard fast food restaurants and almost sit-down restaurant-style fast food. Looking back and what was considered fancy and standard seemed to be the likelihood of eating in the restaurant or taking the food out. Another 80’s invention cemented in idea of a fancy fast food restaurant – the salad bar.
A fancy fast-food restaurant was one you went to for special occasions. When I think of fancy fast food, it was the fast food that we went to after church. If there was a special family reason to go out (not just shopping or traveling) we would stop by a fancy fast-food restaurant. If it was stopping somewhere for a snack it would be the standard of McDonald’s, Burger King, or KFC. We would never snack at fancy fast food.
Even if stores had similar offerings that didn’t necessarily make one fancier than another based on the menu. Let’s take a look at Rax versus Arby’s. Growing up I was exposed to both. It could be argued that both the Elyria and Amherst Arby’s stores had a very wooden and plastic 70’s feel to both the stores. The Rax stores on the other hand didn’t have as many booths as much as it had tables. It felt like you were in a real restaurant while you were eating. Rax had fantastic milkshakes that included whipped cream and cherries (which everyone seems to be trying these days). Most of all Rax had the salad bar.
Salad bars were the thing for a while. Regular restaurants all had salad bars. The emergence of salad bar seems to be one of the key things to distinguish yourself from a normal plebeian restaurant. We went through things like kale decoration, ice-chilling pots of vegetables, and sneeze guards, and the list continued. For a while, there was a cold war level of new salad bar-level technology as the restaurants attempted to outdo each other.
Wendy’s was the first that I remembered with a salad. Then it expanded with all-you-can-eat salad bars at Rax. I think the winner at the end of the salad bar war was Ponderosa. They straddled the line between buffet and restaurant at a very fine line.
When Ponderosa started it was all about selling you steak and potatoes. You would walk in and order your steak and drink at the counter. You would then be given a number card and told to find a seat. You would then wait for a waitress would refill your drink and bring your meal. Then they added a salad bar. The salad was only a couple of dollars, eventually though it became their most popular item. The price difference between ordering just the salad bar or getting a steak with the salad bar was $1.00-$2.00. Too bad the steak wasn’t that good.
At this point, Ponderosa had added everything to straddle the buffet. The only meat you could get was fried chicken wings, but you could get most vegetables and even pizza. This is why it got too popular for its own good. At the end of gorging yourself on the faux buffet, you could then get ice cream to finish the meal off. You could also go in and eat two quarts worth of ice cream if you wanted. It was all the celebration of food, and it was glorious. Unfortunately in my area of Ohio Ponderosa went under. It was all owned by the same owner and he was laundering money.
What is the difference between a normal fast-food restaurant and a fancy one? The fancy one you had to wear button-up shirts too. The fancy one hardly ever had visitors through the drive-through (and some of them didn’t even have drive-throughs). The fancy restaurant would be the one you went to after church. The fancy restaurant would also cost a bit more on average.
The cost is important because it gave the illusion that one restaurant was better than the other. The food isn’t much better (ok Ponderosa did manage to make fast-food steak). The furniture was better, and the salad bar was there, if anything the cost went into overhead and not into the food itself.
At some point, my generation just disrupted this whole thing. We realize that our money spends. Sit-down restaurants that my parents would have dressed me in my khakis and a button-down shirt, I now go to with shorts and whatever t-shirt that I happen to be wearing. I go to nicer restaurants than my parents would have even taken me to, and I still dress the same way. We realized money spent and we don’t need to conform to an atmosphere. Today the price difference is now the illusion that one place uses better ingredients than the other.
The fancier fast food restaurants today aren’t Rax and Wendy’s. The fancier fast food is now Chipotle, Chic-Fil-A, and Pinks. Places where you have the illusion of better quality, but it isn’t. It’s pretty much the same wherever you go. McDonald’s even owned Chipotle for a while – and most people didn’t even notice. There is no way you could get me to dress up to go out for fast food today, yet when I was young – that’s just what we did.
