the most.
—DANNY MEYER
Not far from Northstar Café in Columbus, there’s a Wendy’s that served as a test prototype for the company’s new futuristic-looking stores. For a newcomer who once drew comfort from the bland, retirement-home motif of a classic Wendy’s store, seeing its new model is like discovering that your childhood house has been turned into a vape lounge. Gone are the earthy tones, that iconic brown mansard roof, the brick columns, the clumsy, curved black sunroom front, and the parapets. Nowhere is there a mention of “old-fashioned hamburgers.” In their place are tall, black glass windows and red signage. Simple text declares, “Quality is our recipe.”
As you approach, the store entrance is a black automatic sliding door. (A black automatic sliding door at a Wendy’s!) And inside, instead of Kenny Loggins, Top 40 hits play from speakers above. There’s also a tall red plank adorned with a shiny large flat-screen television, a long rectangular gas fireplace, and a mishmash of seating configurations that include low tables and lounge chairs, Starbucks-style high-top tables with outlets for plugs, some cushy padded dining booths, and a set of small tables with movable chairs. At the counter, the menu boards are bright digital white, and cylindrical lamps hang from a wood-paneled ceiling above like Courbets at the Musée d’Orsay. Simply put, Wendy’s no longer looked like an elderly relative’s sitting room; it was now the lair of someone who’d become either a late-in-life swinger or a villain in a Liam Neeson movie.
The development of this new Wendy’s model—four new, equally mod configurations are in wide adoption around the United States—can be seen as a direct result of the rise in popularity of fast casual, a newer, trendier segment of the restaurant industry. Fast casual has forcefully emerged to capitalize on the negative associations of fast food as impersonal, unhealthy, and mass-produced. Part of its appeal, particularly among millennials, is that fast-casual chains such as Chipotle and Panera tend to strike a holier-than-fast-food posture. A customer pays slightly more and waits slightly longer for food with ingredients that are said to be better and that gets served by workers who tend to make ever-so-slightly higher wages.* The spaces look less like square and traditional dining rooms and more like coffee shops. And like in the original White Castles and Steak ’n Shakes, the food is often prepared in an open or visible kitchen to reassure diners about its quality.
Wendy’s isn’t the only fast-food chain plugging deep into this new aesthetic. In Louisville, one of KFC’s new model stores had the similarly sleek look of the lobby of a hotel for business travelers, albeit one with an enormous chicken-bucket lighting feature. Over on one wall, in the center of a neatly arranged small display of historical company paraphernalia and a stately looking photo of the Colonel, was some lettering billing Harland Sanders as THE ORIGINAL CELEBRITY CHEF. Meanwhile, by the counter, a mounted chalkboard listed the name of the store’s cook that day as well as the provenance of that day’s chicken.
Elsewhere, in recent years, chains like Chick-fil-A and Arby’s have debuted large modern stores set in the dead middle of city centers. For the many younger Americans who have moved back into cities and eschewed owning cars, these new urban concepts have been built without drive-thrus. The first, full-scale Chick-fil-A store in New York City, for example, opened in 2015. At three stories and five thousand square feet, it was the largest store in the franchise’s system when it opened. (On an early visit, one executive bragged that the store runs through thirty thousand pickles a day.) Quickly, it became one of the few anointed Manhattan institutions with a nearly permanent out-the-door line. In 2018, it was eclipsed by an even-larger five-story unit with a rooftop in Lower Manhattan, just a few blocks east of the World Trade Center.
A few months after Manhattan’s first Chick-fil-A arrived, Arby’s opened a branch in the grimy shadow of Port Authority; the store had been modeled after an experimental design in Pittsburgh. In a surreal turn for a brand that Jon Stewart once called “a dare for your colon,” this sparkling-new Arby’s features Edison bulbs, wood accents, an open kitchen, and coffee sourced from a local roaster. “Overall, we had a strategy to bring Arby’s into more urban environments,” Arby’s CEO, Paul Brown, told me at the opening. “We started a few years ago, making sure we could get the design right and making sure we could do