The Year That Fast Casual (Kinda, Sorta, Maybe) Grew Up
Ah, "fast casual." Few phrases are guaranteed to strike less excitement in my heart or fewer anticipatory stirrings in my belly. I know: I'm out of step. That great, mushily defined category, we are told, is The Future, it's the Way People Want to Eat: i.e., with better ingredients, more customization, and less stigma than fast food, but a lower time commitment and amount of human interaction than traditional restaurants. To use the examples that inspire the starriest dollar-signs in chef-entrepreneurs' eyes: Chipotle and Shake Shack. It was, after all, around the time that Danny Meyer's burger side project had a $1.6 billion IPO that chefs everywhere suddenly discovered their populist sides.
I have nothing against delicious burgers. Or rich chefs. (Burritos are garbage, but we can discuss that another time.) Still, as far as experience goes, the fast-casual genre has always stunk to me of little more than sad office lunch. It is true that I speak from a position of non-office-working privilege, but I promise my home lunches will out-sad you any day. And I'm not trying to turn them into the next big restaurant trend.
I can't tell you that this was the year that completely changed my mind, but I did find my prejudices wavering. At Commissary, a bakery, butcher, and sandwich shop in downtown Dallas, I devoured a porchetta sandwich as glorious as any version I've eaten outside of Ariccia, Italy: herbal, juicy, and topped with crispy hog skin. (At weekend brunch, it is sadly replaced by a less-good breakfast-sandwich version.) At GReKo Greek Street Food, an East Nashville newcomer with roots in a longstanding Tennessee restaurant family, I enjoyed glistening chunks of "Korinthian" lamb shoulder, roasted over a live fire and served with homemade pita and fries dusted with oregano and mizithra cheese.
On both coasts, I marveled at attempts to crack the code of fast-casual pasta, the natural extension of an America that, in the past fifteen years, has come to expect a decent bowl of noodles nearly everywhere. Uovo in Santa Monica, from a co-founder of the sushi chain Sugarfish, is the more pleasant experience; I could sit at its counter watching the battery of chefs mesmerically bang out pans of cacio e pepe and all'arrabiata for hours. By the end, I kind of wanted to work there. There's no chance to watch the pasta cook at New York's Pasta Flyer, which is located, as it happens, in a onetime Chipotle. The place is the creation of Mark Ladner, the James Beard–award-winning former chef at New York Times–four-star Del Posto, and through some sort of mechanical sorcery each portion of noodles is made to order behind the walk-up counter in what feels like a matter of seconds. But a special of deep-fried lasagna bites—a paper sleeve containing what is essentially the burnt, crispy corners of a lasagna pan—might have been the single most purely delicious thing I ate all year.
Sitting down at an actual table at lunchtime at San Francisco's RT Rotisserie, surrounded by Caviar delivery people and assistants dashing in for takeout for their bosses' desk lunches, I felt as weird, idle, and out of time as the old men I used to see hanging around the Nathan's Famous in Times Square. That didn't affect my enjoyment of a moist, crisp-skinned chicken sandwich, or of the Rotisserie Fat Rice, a bowl of perfect sushi grains, cooked in the juices of the birds slowly turning in the rotisserie and then larded with their fat. In fact, I was pretty sure I was doing it right.
For all that, part of me still can't help but feel that fast casual is The Bad Place masquerading as The Good Place, that there's something dystopian about the rush to dismantle the traditional restaurant-labor ecosystem, and traditional restaurant niceties, in the breezy name of modernity and convenience.
You don't need to go far to see fast-casual experimentation scuttle what might otherwise be wonderful dinners. Consider the maddening case of Duna, the Central European–inspired restaurant opened in San Francisco's Mission last year by two veterans of Bar Tartine. "Fine-casual" is how they describe their restaurant and its new spinoff, Smokebread. The food is extraordinarily delicious: a Hungarian fish stew filled with delicate mounds of fish sausage and thrumming California chiles; a chopped "spoon salad" of salami, tomme cheese, mushrooms, and Brussels sprouts that reminds me of the La Scala salad at Joe Allen in New York, about as diametrically opposite a restaurant as it's possible to imagine; warm rounds of smoked potato bread served alongside a dip of paprika-spiked farmer cheese covered in sesame seeds—a pimiento cheese by way of the Danube and the fermentation lab. But the dining experience does all it can to undermine the food: The counter service is clumsy. The décor is all yarn and forest detritus, as though you're dining at a Wiccan knitting collective. Make all the fun you want of those server lectures on how the menu works, or multiple check-ins on "how those first bites are tasting." You'll miss them when you've ordered too much or too little food or when nobody's noticing that you can't get past a first sip of a house cocktail of wasabi and shoju. With fast casual, you get your food and you're on your own. Maybe it is the future after all.
Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.
