One format I’ve seen at more places over the past decade or so is the order at the counter, help yourself to drinks, and they’ll bring the food to your table. Sort of a cross between counter service and table service.
Places like Smashburger, Noodles & Company, Dickies BBQ, Buffalo Wild Wings.
Other places do a similar thing where you retrive your own food when it’s ready (Panera, FiveGuys) but I don’t care for these as much.
Bolding mine.
Really?! At the one here you order at your table and they bring everything to you.
I was at a restaurant recently where (IIRC) you got the first refill free and any more would cost you.
I’ve noticed more restaurants have different people deliver your food than the one who took your order. Also, more TVs.
I’ve noticed that too. Just today, in fact, but it was at a pretty non-traditional restaurant.
Of course we must mention the trend of restaurants decorating their walls with crazy junk.
And food courts. When did food courts start popping up?
Luncheonettes have pretty much vanished: small restaurants specializing in sandwiches, hamburgers, hot dogs, and ice cream. In fact, it’s pretty hard to find an ice cream parlor that also serves meals these days; Friendly’s, one of the few still around, is cutting back stores.
In the 60s, there were several of these in my old home town: primarily counter service, where you could get a burger, fries, and a drink (about $1 in the early 70s) and with a wide variety of ice cream sundaes. One or two are still around simply because there is no fast food within 10 miles.
Menus, of course, are more wide ranging; you used to only be able to get American as well as a few ethnic foods like Chinese or Italian (and with more limited options). Now you find sushi or thai food just about anywhere (though German food is dropping in popularity).
And Chinese and pizza were about the only kinds of food you could get delivered. Now everyone does it, though many use a service.
What in the hell is up with their website? I’ve tried roaming around for 5 minutes and there’s no chance to look at the current menu, the previous menus, the price list, the cocktail menu from the speakeasy. Nothing. Yes, the FAQ for the ticket system is lovely and all, but it shouldn’t be literally the first and basically only thing I can see on the website.
A lot of that problem is just as due to consumer ignorance as server ignorance. I mean, my mother-in-law swears that “dark beers” give her headaches, and that she can only drink "lagers’.
So I tried giving her an amber lager one time (I think it may have been Breckenridge Pandora’s Bock, actually), and no dice. It was a "dark beer’ and not a “lager”, when in point of fact, it’s not a dark beer, and is most certainly a lager.
To her, describing it as “kind of a darker beer” would be just about the right amount of info.
But even pizza wasn’t always about delivery. I remember when Pizza Hut’s locations were only sit-down restaurants, with waitress service and a salad bar (remember the red roofs on the restaurants?). Now almost all of the new locations are set up for delivery or pickup.
When I was a kid in the 1970s or 1980s, we ate a home-cooked meal almost every night and most weekend lunches. Going out or bringing in take out was a special treat. Now, few people cook from scratch. Some large percentage of meals in America are either take-out from a restaurant, prepared foods from a supermarket, frozen meals, delivered meals, etc.
That dates back to the 70s. Bobby McGee’s was among the first chains to empty the thrift shops for decor.
That’s true. Domino’s changed the game in, I believe, the late 60s.
Salads are more adventurous these days; in the 60s, they were all iceberg with a little tomato, cucumber, and onion. No fancy greens. Roquefort dressing was common; it’s vanished today.
Yes. I’m sure someone, somewhere has done some kind of functional analysis on this that shows its value, but to me it seems to promote confusion more than anything else. Even with codes and so forth the servers don’t know who got what, can’t answer any questions about it and seem to have to relay things like requests for a replacement fork, a refill, or whatever. I hope the trend goes away soon.
How did I miss that one? We’ve walked out of restaurants that didn’t have a TV-free zone. Even if you’re a non-watcher and it’s showing something you don’t care about (like hockey), it’s impossible to keep having your attention dragged to it. That’s assuming they’re silent and not babbling at you, drowning out any chance at conversation.
We sit down to dinner every night, even if it has to be squeezed in. It’s a very rare night that we are home and don’t eat together; if it’s a very rushed night or we feel like it, we’ll go out for something cheap, maybe once a week at most.
I am constantly reminded how unusual this is - the kids have friends over that stay for dinner, and they are very uncomfortable with everyone sitting at the table eating. I have several town-related committee meetings a month, and in the chatter about families and scheduling and such, it’s clear that work, kid activities, community doings and such all take precedence over ever eating together - and these are mostly educated, upscale rural/suburban families, the kind you’d think would be a last bastion of such conventionality. But I mention that we eat together every night, or that I do most of the cooking, and they look at me like I just walked off the set of the Andy Griffith Show.
ETA: I do not in any way look like I walked off the set of the Andy Griffith Show, by the way.
I really do think the world would be a better place if families had that half hour together, at least five or six nights a week. Everyone grabbing crap food on independent schedules, beginning when kids are too young to make sensible meals for themselves (under 25) can only be a step down in so many ways.
At a few of them, like BWW, it seems to be other wait persons that apparently didn’t have anything else to do at that moment.
Not even Don Knotts?
The nice part about living alone is I can eat whenever and whereever I want.
Possibly. But I’ve seen what looks like a two-tier system in a number of restaurants. Maybe the second tier is junior or in training or something, or not “polished and pretty” enough to be lead waitstaff. But there’s definitely a hierarchy between host/esses, waiters and servers.
ETA: If by BWW you mean Buffalo Wild Wings, they don’t seem to do things the same as anyone else. There’s a strangeness to the way the dining rooms are managed and served that isn’t entirely due to five thousand square feet of video screens.
Where’s my bullet?
No, I look more like one of the hippie weirdo freaks that Efrem Zimbalist was arresting every other week.
You discover the kitchen floor is cold, hard tile quite soon.
All California restaurants are now no smoking. What a wonderful change.
Could be. It does get kind of confusing though as they all seem to have the same uniforms.