eating at home piqued the interest of the Department of Agriculture, which dedicated a study of the phenomenon in 1989. It found that the 34 percent of American food budgets that had been devoted to dining away from home in 1970 had ballooned to nearly 46 percent by 1989. Fast-food and casual-dining chains grabbed a lot of the traffic. In 1989, fast food captured 41 percent of the total amount spent on food outside the home. Three years later, the top two hundred chains reaped more than 50 percent of restaurant sales, besting independent restaurants for the first time ever.
These changes were about more than just familiarity and ubiquity or the convenience of not cooking; they were increasingly about time. It became more and more routine for lunch or dinner to be served in a paper bag and handed through a window to someone in an idling car, where it would be wolfed down on the road or perhaps saved for home (less about half the fries, of course). As the drive-thru lines grew in the 1980s and early ’90s, chains schemed up and tested more car-friendly items, designed with dashboard dining in mind. Wendy’s introduced pita wraps, KFC invented miniature handheld sandwiches called Chicken Littles, and Taco Bell further embraced the possibilities of the folded tortilla.
A few new arrivals on the fast-food scene also popped up to take the growing need for speed to its logical extreme. Resembling tiny islets in a river of cars, quick-service restaurants like Checkers, Rally’s, and Central Park started appearing in the mid-1980s, largely outfitted with double drive-thrus. Customers in cars would often be served out of two windows on opposite sides of the building, a stressful-looking arrangement that all but dared a diner to approach the store by foot. In many cases, there weren’t dining rooms anyway, sometimes just a few token outdoor tables for alfresco dining with a small side of car exhaust.
What the double drive-thrus lack in serendipitous community and hospitality, they make up for in velocity and economy. Using mere fractions of the real estate and employees required by bigger fast-food restaurants, these express burger spots have parlayed lower overheads into prices that run about 30 percent less than their competitors’. And with more limited menus, transactions can often be completed in less than a minute. In their impersonal, car-centric character, these bare-bones newcomers in some ways represent a thematic return to the early days of fast food, when the bloated, pricier menus and slow operations of drive-ins and diners seemed primed for disruption. Like a drive-thru itself, time is a flat circle.
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Despite the emergence of new entrants and upstarts, the bigger chains reaped the rewards of drive-thru mania. By the late 1980s, the number of McDonald’s locations with drive-thrus had grown to seven thousand strong, each with the capacity to serve 144 cars an hour or one every twenty-five seconds. In 1988, for the first time more than 50 percent of McDonald’s sales were conducted through the drive-thru window. The primacy of fast food and its drive-thru didn’t reveal itself solely through the rogue capture of American food budgets, but also through a new dominance over all meals of the day. And with the help of a handheld specialty item, eating breakfast in America never looked the same again.
Long before the Egg McMuffin became the national breakfast sandwich, it started as a simple culinary mash note. Its creator, a former adman and a McDonald’s franchisee named Herb Peterson, loved eggs Benedict. And so he worked away in his Santa Barbara kitchen like a nuclear scientist in Bushehr, seeking breakthrough capacity for an eggs Benedict that would translate to the fast-food world. In the early 1970s, Peterson cracked the code by cooking eggs in a custom-built Teflon ring instead of poaching them, and in a stroke of genius, he replaced hollandaise sauce with a slice of good old, ready-to-melt, goddamn American cheese. The concoction was placed on a toasted English muffin topped with Canadian bacon. Ray Kroc had just finished lunch when he was called upon to sample one; he ate two of them on the spot.
Like its quick-service knockoff, eggs Benedict is an American dish. Culinary historians overwhelmingly trace its creation to Lemuel Benedict, the hungover Wall Street stockbroker who stumbled into the Waldolf-Astoria hotel one morning in 1894 and demanded a breakfast made with bread, poached eggs, pork, and hollandaise. The rest is history. The open-faced creation became an instant standby at the hotel and then