In the director’s commentary for Gladiator, Ridley Scott talks about how the Roman’s must have had restaurants, even though experts seemed to doubt the idea.
I’ve just had a quick look through my Pompeii books that I could find, and nothing in them confirms the existence of "fast food: restaurants. There certainly were shops selling bread (we have wall-paintings), wine, oil, and the fish sauce called Garum, but nothing explicitly confirming small restaurants.
Nevertheless, I suspect they must have been there. Artisans and workmen ate somewhere, and I’ll bet they didn’t pack a meal, at least EVERY day. The street side of the large houses were studded with tiny, mostly one-room shops, and it’s never been made clear to me what they all sold. They can’t all have been selling jewelry and trinkets and bread.
“Ancient history. . . In the Roman Empire, common folk in cities often had no kitchen of their own; they did their cooking in large public kitchens. Some had small mobile bronze stoves, on which a fire could be lit for cooking. Wealthy Romans had relatively well-equipped kitchens . . . .”
I’ve read elsewhere (New Yorker magazine) that since lower class Romans worked so hard and such long days, they mostly didn’t want to be bothered cooking or cooking communally, so they bought “take-in.” I’m trying to find the essay where it’s described more fully, the vendor’s set-up, what they bought, etc.
Look up capouna online. that happens to be the word for the hot food ‘diner’ where you can take out or eat there if they were large enough to have a couple tables outside the shop.
I’ve just done a quick search, and in the journal Neurosurgery (!!) 55(4):989-1006, October 2004 is the following article:
The Legacy of Pompeii and Its Volcano.
de Divitiis, E. Cappabianca, P. Esposito, F. Cavallo, L. M.
One line in the article (which I can’t actually access here) mentions "This
type of eating establishment, a sort of fast food restaurant, could provide a …
"