McDonald’s alone serves twenty-six million people every day at its fourteen thousand American outlets-more than the population of Australia. Each month, more than two hundred million people eat at least one meal at one of the hundred and sixty thousand fast-food restaurants in the United States. The cheeseburger you get at a McDonald’s in Orlando is exactly the same as the one you get at a McDonald’s in San Francisco, Montreal, or Little Rock. The category, referred to broadly as fast casual dining, is growing more quickly than any other segment of the market.įor more than fifty years, eating at fast-food restaurants has been an almost clinically impersonal experience: the food is rapidly prepared, remarkably cheap, utterly uniform, and served immediately. Sweetgreen and places like Lyfe Kitchen, Chipotle, Smashburger, Five Guys, Shake Shack, and Dig Inn now occupy the rapidly expanding middle ground between restaurants with tablecloths and the giant fast-food chains. But millions of diners, fuelled by concerns about their health and the state of the environment-and propelled by a general distaste for industrially produced and highly processed food-have begun to shun the ubiquitous chains that have long shaped the American culinary character. Many people wouldn’t have considered it food at all. Ten years ago, no American would have regarded a bowl of vegetable scraps dressed with lime-cilantro or spicy pesto vinaigrette as fast food. “Decent prices matter, too.” The women were working their way through one of the restaurant’s seasonal specialties-the “wast ED” salad, which consists almost entirely of carrot peels, broccoli stalks, roasted bread heels, cabbage cores, and other ingredients that are usually tossed out. “We want what we eat to be healthy and tasty,’’ Davis said. “Nothing fancy,’’ Davis told me one recent evening, as she took a sidewalk table next to mine at Sweetgreen in Nolita. Like many of their millennial peers, Kathleen Davis and Andrea Nguyen eat out a lot.

Michael Donahue, co-founder of Lyfe Kitchen, wants to convert customers “who have always thought healthy food has to taste like straw.” Photograph by Andrew B.

Healthier fast food places