One really new trend is to serve food in paper-lined iron cone frames. Mostly I’ve seen fries served this way, but I’ve seen bread served like that too.
Olive oil as a dipping sauce instead of butter is pretty common.
Sweet potato fries! Yay!
Yes and no. Portion sizes are definitely larger. But more and more places are cooking things to order.
I remember 1970s Potato Hell.
I was at a men’s club in the early 70s. (They allowed women, but really it was a place to go to get away from the wives.) I ordered hash browns with my meal. When I got them I was stoked. Mmm, fresh grated potatoes skillet fried to a crispy golden brown. Perfect, except that they were still frozen. Could any place that’s not fast food get away with that today?
And I remember every place that we went, mashed potaoes were offered as a side. In every place my parents asked if they were real potatoes. Nope, instant, in every single restaurant. Once again, today’s places wouldn’t get away with that.
And while unhealthy food abounds, it’s easier that ever to eat healthy. If I order a burger and fries, I might be asked if I want regular fries, curly, waffle, or sweet potato. If I say the fries I want are cole slaw or a house salad, I am almost never refused. Maybe I’ll have to pay an additional 50 cents, which is no big deal.
My point was that if someone wants fried chicken, then many fast food places provide a fried chicken like substance which can be eaten at a low price. I do agree that fast food restaurants are not really sit down restaurants, even if they have tables and chairs in them.
I’m really pretty surprised that you can’t find fried chicken in a sit down restaurant, though. I wouldn’t have thought that San Antone was all that different from Fort Worth. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a chain restaurant, but fried chicken is offered in just about every place that I go to which serves American food. The only exception is J.R.'s steakhouse, and I think that’s because it’s a pretty upscale place, the sort of place that only opens for dinner. Well, I should say the only exception that I’ve been to. Now, I’m going to notice whether or not a place serves fried chicken. I hope you’re happy.
SA has many fried chicken fast food chains - more than any other city I’ve been in, and I’m from Georgia. But the availability of fried chicken in sit-down restaurants has been declining ever since people realized it’s not the heart-smart option.
It seems to me that a lot of places DO serve instant mashed potatoes. However, I’m going by the taste, here, I haven’t asked. But if a place serves mashed potatoes that have that instant boxed flavor, generally I just don’t go back.
I worked at a diner here in central Washington that had been in operation since the 1920s or '30s under different names and owners. The current owner found an old menu from the 1960s that wasn’t too different, price-wise, from the one you found. I remember seeing steak & eggs for something like $1.35.
My friend tells a story of how, many years ago, he was eating dinner at a friend’s house, with said friend’s parents and siblings. He helped himself to the mashed potatoes, took a bite, and exclaimed, “Hey, these are real mashed potatoes!” His friend’s family all looked at him like he was crazy, and were all, “What else would they be?” Well, see, my friend had already been working in restaurants for a few years at that point, and had gotten used to eating the instant mashed potatoes served there.
I can usually tolerate instant mashed - that, or I have been lucky enough not to run into too much of it in recent years. Most restaurant put “stuff” - garlic, onion, spices, broth - in their mashed and that may help disguise the flavor.
What I can’t tolerate and will not return for is precooked meat. A new “cowboy steakhouse” opened near us a few years ago and I knew the owner through business associations. We ate there twice. Both times I had a sliced-meat dish (sliced tri-tip one time, maybe a shredded steak sandwich the second). Both times the meat had that slightly sweet, faintly gamy taste of stuff prepared and partially cooked, then frozen or refrigerated for later finish cooking. This was not a particularly cheap or low-end place that emphasized its beef; I found reasons to never go back. When I run into that taste on something that shouldn’t have it, it’s my last time at that restaurant. (I will sometimes let it pass on the diner or upscale fast-food level, but will probably not order that item again.)
ETA: I asked the owner later and he finally admitted that nearly everything they served, except the steaks themselves, came pre-portioned and mostly pre-cooked from the central distributor for the chain; that was their secret big deal for franchisees - ostensibly competing with Outback and other steak places with 30% lower food costs. Blecch.)
This hasn’t been the case in my experience- generally, you get chips and salsa, without any variation in the type.
Some places bring an alternate salsa as well- the avocado/sour cream stuff you mention, or a fire-roasted type salsa, but neither is ubiquitous the way that chips and salsa always have been.
According to the CPI, a dollar in 1942 would be worth $14 today. A 15 cent beer would be all of $2 today, and a 35 cent anything is roughly $5. The Tbone with the fixings is $18 and change - so still absurdly cheap with all the caveats: war time, pre-highway, posh LA restaurant, pre-globalization…
Never. When was this? Where was this?
Sizzlers left my area in the late '90s and I assumed they just dissolved. My vague recollection was that the lighting was dark and the food was delicious. Perhaps too delicious. According to wiki that they lost a ton of money from their buffets and never really recovered. Funny how places like Golden Corall was able to profit from the cheap buffet model but Sizzlers not.
The reasonable allure for food trucks is that if you work in the middle of downtown and near a food truck hotspot, you can get non-cafeteria, non-chain food for lunch at more or less a reasonable price. However, the clientele for food trucks extends to hipsters, which is something I really don’t fully comprehend.
I know a couple that will travel to the far side of the city to visit certain food trucks. It’s their “thing.” I don’t know that I’d call them hipsters, it’s just something they seem to enjoy.
Not quite the same thing, but we had a Mad Englishman drag us halfway across London to have a bite at his favorite place… which turned out to be a microscopic mobile crepes stand. It was worth the jaunt.
Hipsters may be an unfair generalization. I was more getting at the fact that people who frequent food trucks at their inconvenience rather than convenience baffle me. The food that is truck-made isn’t better than the same food made in an easily accessible restaurant. If you want Korean bbq or Bahn Mi or Pho, there are thousands of places that serve the food better, with seating, and for cheaper than visiting a food truck.
I’ve never seen one, but apparently it wasn’t uncommon at upscale restaurants, at least through the 1970s (and may still exist occasionally today, according to this New York times article from 2006). The idea was that the “guest” (women, but also business associates or family members) wouldn’t know what the cost of their meal was. In the case of men taking women out to dinner, it was apparently considered to be a chivalrous sort of thing.
When I worked at McDonald’s as recently as 2000, we accepted cash only, and so did every other fast food place. In fact it was probably 50/50 odds that stores in general accepted credit/debit cards.
And man I miss the “upscale” Pizza Huts! I used to go there as a kid fairly often for Book It, listen to “Kokomo” on the jukebox and play Mario on the single arcade game there. Then I’d sit down and have a candle lit personal pan pizza with my mom. Mom doesn’t like pizza, so she’d get one of those delicious hot ham and cheese sandwiches Pizza Hut used to sell. Those were the days.
“Hipsters” was as close as I could come to describing the people who’ve recently begun frequenting food trucks. “Foodies” might also express it. The point is that food trucks used to be just for blue-collar workers who wanted to get something cheap to eat right next to their work site. Now in many places there are a lot of food trucks for the sort of people who like to try a variety of restaurants. The cuisines available are often quite varied and sometimes the food is quite good.
[QUOTE=NitroPress]
… 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.
[/QUOTE]
Count yourself lucky. I hear Amateur Barbarian is the spitting image of Otis.
Outside of fast food places and school hot lunches, I honestly can’t think of a single restaurant I’ve been to in the last 20 years that has had anything but real mashed potatoes. To me, instant mashed potatoes is the stuff of frozen dinners, school lunches, and KFC (and if they’re not instant, they’re indistinguishable from instant.)
