Also the portions are large (which everyone already knows). But it is also culturally normal to take a doggie bag of the leftovers home with you, to supply additional meals. ie one restaurant meal is good for more than one meal.
This arose because the easiest way for a restaurant to increase revenue is to increase portion sizes and hence the price.
Haha, yes. A friend of mine went to live in the states for a while. The first time he saw people taking their unfinished meals with them he thought he was eating in some kind of restaurant/food shelter combination. Needless to say, he quickly caught on to the trend and now actively advocates it over the European system.
American here. Everyone I know calls McDonald's a restaurant. They may choose not to eat there for health or ideological reasons, but everyone agrees that it is a restaurant, and has been a restaurant since its inception decades ago.
If I say to a friend, "What restaurants are around here?" nobody I know would ever reply with "McDonald's." It is a "fast food place," not a "restaurant." A "restaurant" has table service and a higher standard of food quality.
The original comment said that Americans consider McDonald's a restaurant, in implicit contrast to unnamed other places where McDonald's does not qualify as a "restaurant," as a way to suggest that Americans have lower standards than others for food quality.
I am pointing out that, at least among the people I've known my whole life here in the US, this is definitely not the case; McDonald's and other fast food places are not in any sense considered "restaurants," no more than a gas station that sells microwave burritos is a "restaurant."
I'm with Gamblor. That may be your experience, but in my experience McDonald's barely sneaks into the definition of "restaurant." It could certainly be mentioned in response to "What restaurants are around here?"
A restaurant would be anywhere that a group can go to have food prepared for them, and then sit down and eat it. Most gas stations don't qualify on either count.
(And incidentally I've been to some really excellent, chef-owned restaurants that don't have table service. Cajun places, mainly. Cajun seems to occupy a weird intersection between "classy" and "cheap" that no other cuisine can enter.)
The original comment said that Americans consider McDonald's a restaurant, in implicit contrast to unnamed other places where McDonald's does not qualify as a "restaurant," as a way to suggest that Americans have lower standards than others for food quality.
I hope you limbered up sufficiently before stretching so far to find a way to take that as an insult.
McDonald's is in some technical, economic sense a "restaurant" in that it serves food for pay. In non-technical everyday usage, the word "restaurant" implies table service, excluding places where you must carry your own food around.
It really depends. Where I come from, 'Should we go to a restaurant' is rarely used. We'd usually say 'eating out'. And McDonalds was definitely 'eating out'.
> In non-technical everyday usage, the word "restaurant" implies table service
The english language varies considerably by geographical region, the speaker's socioeconomic class, etc. Your statement is not universally true; I've met people to whom it's true and people to whom it's not.
McDonalds might call themselves a restaurant (and I'm sure many others also do, Burger King, Wimpy, KFC, etc)…but I'm sure most people wouldn't describe them as a restaurant - it's a convenient marketing term, nothing more.
I'm in the US, and I don't think I've ever seen a restaurant cheaper than McDonald's. You can get a filling meal there for $2 if you order from the dollar menu. Even at most other cheap fast food places, you couldn't do that for less than $5.
