And one more thing I’ve noticed: Olde English font on signs, not just restaurant signs but everywhere, has gone the way of the dodo. That used to be a signifier of “upscale/classy”. That and carriage lamps.
My Target has some kind of snack bar, as does a very old K-Mart: hot dogs, soft drinks, chips, and popcorn. So…antiquated. The bigger gas stations are a big step up, selling real food (salads, sandwiches, yogurt, fruit. Pre-packaged, but it used to be all Slim Jims and candy bars.)
There used to be those tiny mostly takeout restaurants downtown, on every block. You could buy a fried-egg sandwich wrapped in wax paper, to go, for less than a dollar. There was a White Castle imitator that all the street people used to hang out in, and they had the best burgers, really cheap. Now most of those places are gone, replaced with chain restaurants and expensive snooty places with ridiculous one word names. Like ‘Plate’ or ‘Zone’ or ‘Low’. …Maybe it’s because food at restaurants is now trucked in, frozen, and nuked, not cooked to order, but has it always been so SALTY? No matter where we eat, everything is so salty (not to mention drenched in melted cheese and bacon), I have to drink liters of water throughout the night :mad: .
A recent trend is food trucks. In some big cities, there are now lots of trucks that sell food. They usually move around the city each day.
Perhaps a new trend is good take-out food from gas stations. I can’t tell if this is really a trend yet or may soon be one. This place reportedly does the best Mexican food in the Baltimore-Washington area:
I’m not sure how new that is, except maybe in that they park places the general public can find them. Going back a ways, maybe to the 40s, they tended to trundle from job site to job site serving laborers.
Yes, but the food trucks that went to construction sites only offered basic food (egg sandwiches, hamburgers, etc.). The current food truck trend is different in that it’s for more upscale food of all sorts of cuisines and in places other than construction sites.
Part of the difference is that food trucks are now hip places to go:
Probably true overall, but ca. 2000 I worked at a place that had dueling roach coaches, one with an extensive selection of Mexican and one that was heavy on California Cuisine. I think the plain burger-and-wiches sellers were seeing competition ten years before that in some places.
But yeah, I’ll concede that the whole segment has improved in quality and selection, probably driven as much by tighter regulation and oversight as by customer demand. If you can’t just keep sliding greaseburgers off your pit, may as well start making salads, too. 
Those of you that don’t happen to live in cities where food trucks have become hipster fashionable places to go may be surprised by their popularity. Cities where this true include (according to Wikipedia) D.C., New York, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Saint Louis, and Tampa. Yeah, it’s kind of a strange trend, but a lot of trends are strange.
So, when those Folgers commercials claimed they were replacing the fine coffee the restaurant normally served with dark, sparkling Folgers crystals… they were really serving Folgers all along? No wonder no one could tell the difference! 
40 yrs old here, grew up in suburban western Houston, and that’s what I was thinking as I read the thread as well.
We didn’t go out much as a kid, and when we didn’t eat home-cooked food, it was typically DQ hamburgers at home, but we did occasionally go out, and it seemed like the restaurants were a lot more local. Until I was in high school, the nationwide non-fast food chains were indicated by a single outpost- I can recall maybe 2 Chili’s prior to the advent of high school, and most of the places you saw were more local- even the chain ones were local or regional chains.
There also seems to be a certain difference in the restaurant mix- what I remember as a kid is a bunch of lunch-type places- sandwich shops, burger joints, etc… and then “nice” evening-style restaurants. Not a lot of fast-casual or inexpensive sit-down places back then at all- pizza joints and some of the nicer hamburger places seemed to be about it.
Now, there are fast-casual places everywhere, and the more low-rent local sandwich shops and burger joints seem to struggle.
At “nice” places, the chef was relatively anonymous. The maitre d’ was the face of the restaurant, or maybe the (non-cooking) owner, if he was on the premises and glad-handing the patrons.
Sit-down Chinese restaurants with Polynesian decor were once quite the rage. Pu Pu platters and tropical drinks with umbrella. My hometown had two of these: Lee’s Hawaiian Islander and the Pu-Pu Inn.
It’s not just cities. My small college town (20K people, 30K if you count students) has 2-3 of these trucks, with at least one or two more advertising that they’ll be around this summer. In this area, at least, they’re OK but not hugely great. From what I hear, in some cities, they’re really incredibly good.
Which brings me to something else. I’m not sure if this is a local trend or larger, but the new thing here in the past few years are small breweries opening - micro or nano breweries - with a tasting room but no food. That’s where the food trucks come in. They set up outside in the summer, or eschew the truck and set up with hotplates and steam trays inside in the winter. So you might stop in for a beer, and there’s also tacos/pasties/BBQ set up in one corner, completely unrelated to the brewery itself.
Alternatively, if you happen to stop in on a night where there’s not a food table/truck available, or if you’re in the mood for something else, it’s totally OK to bring in food (either takeout or homemade) or order in a pizza or other to-go food.
I’m not a huge fan of the trend, but I’m apparently in the minority because it seems like these kinds of setups are getting more and more popular in this area.
Saw that a lot in the upscale “Yankee” restaurants of the 1970s and 1980s. Sculpted eagles and “Ye Olde Coloniale” paintings, too. Those kinds of places also used to have menus with items like turkey, pot roast, meatloaf, souflee, casserole … all now considered old people/Lutheran food.
Chinese restaurants that specialized in pseudo-Cantonese, like chop suey, were once the norm. Now, it’s pseudo-Mandarin.
“Lee’s Hawaiian Islander” - there’s the old school naming scheme rearing its head.
Well, some of that was perhaps a consequence of the bicentennial.
I was just going to post that. That’s still quite common in my hometown, which has a thriving old-school restaurant scene. A lot of restaurants promote themselves with ads proclaiming “Your host: Rocco Calzonio” or “Your host: Vinnie Paisano”. Restaurant reviews in local newspapers seldom mention the chef.
Probably everyone in the country lives within range of a brewpub, but it’s remarkable that they’ve only been around since 1982 in the US. In 1986, there were only five in the country.
Granted, I live in the heart of beer country, but the growth of the industry in going up exponentially. In my county alone, which isn’t the most populous, there are eleven new brewpubs set to open in the next year. There are two towns in the eastern part of the county, each with about 20,000 people, and by the end of the year each will have three brewpubs, with four of the six new.
The county already has 27 brewpubs (or breweries with taprooms), so next year there will be 38 in a county with 300,000 people. That may be more brewpubs than Starbucks.
My observations (prior to reading the thread)…
Back in the late 1970’s, fried chicken was the #1, most popular item sold at restaurants. Nowadays it is impossible to find in a sit-down restaurant.
Far more variety, in both chains and local restaurants. On the other hand, within genre’s, menus are very similar. OTOH, you’ll have menu items recognized as being healthier (in one way or another) for people looking for something less caloric/gluten-ridden/carbohydrate-laden/fatty/etc. Nobody gave a shit about gluten/carbs/etc in the '70s.
Bigger portions.
Better decor.
More TV sets, less music.
Going out to eat used to be an adventure. Now it’s just something you do because you don’t have the time/desire to cook.
I agree with many of the posters.
I would love to see smaller portions [though I love being able to bring home several extra meals once reportioned out at home.]
I agree that much of the food is drastically unhealthier - like those burgers made by sandwiching the patty between french toast, grilled cheese sandwiches or breaded chicken breasts. This also sort of goes along with the portion control issue.
Artsy fartsy foods like the Alina tasting menus. Yes adventurous food is fun, but sometimes you just want your rosemary in the form of a leafy green thing instead of a dust, foam or whiff.
This makes it harder to send food back after the kitchen or whoever plates the food fucks it up. The assistant server has no idea what you ordered or how you ordered it, so you have to explain it to him after explaining it to the server. (And before anyone says I’m being too picky, I’m talking about basic stuff like “dressing/sauce on the side” that the server may not have written down.)
I think you missed my point - these are not brewpubs; there is no food, there are no waiters. They serve beer, and only beer. No wine, no mixed drinks, no burgers, heck I’m not even sure you can get a coke at some of them. Nothing but beer.
Brewpubs have definitely been around for a long time. But this tasting-room/bar thing is new, at least to me.
The other thing that’s different about these is that you never quite know what they’ll have. One that I’ve been in has about 3 beers that they will always have, and 4 others that change weekly. The others have zero beers that they’ll always have. Instead, they have anywhere from 5-8 tiny batches going at any given time.
In other words, if you had a beer you really liked a week ago, there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll have it again this week. Maybe they’ll have it next month. Maybe they’ll never have it again. It’s cool, but odd at the same time.