Doesn't qualify. In order to be a fast food restaurant, the restaurant must have a drive-thru.
Yeah, we argued this back on FOH and it was still fucking retarded. Thanks for volunteering to be the Tad10 of this thread, though.
I've eaten at McDonalds in a number of foreign airports. Schiphol, Dubai...and they had no drive-thrus. Does that mean that those locations weren't fast-food? I ate at a BK in the Baghdad greenzone iirc, and it was in a sort of a trailer and served from a counter only. I remember there being a McDonalds in Toronto by the giant mall that had no drive thru, and there are similar places in large cities all over the place. Not to mention all of the fast food chains that started out early before drive thru windows were even a standard.
Sorry, but the drive thru argument is ridiculously stupid, the same as it was back on FOH.
Here's another thing: Fast Food restaurants are called QSRs (quick service restaurants) within the industry itself. They would never use a drive thru as a metric for what is or is not a fast food entity. Their metric has usually been along the lines of "Quick Food, minimal or no table service". This is clearly different from "casual dining". IHOP? That's casual dining - you are seated, you are served by a waitress, menus, you pay after you eat, etc. Chipotle? That's a solid QSR (fast food). You aren't seated, you aren't served, you place your order at the counter and they ring you up there, you pay before you eat, then you either sit down and wolf it down with no table service, or you carry it back home to eat.
http://www.qsrmagazine.com/category/chains/chipotle
http://www.qsrmagazine.com/category/chains/five-guys
The 5 Guys by me must be slow as fuck, because it's always longer than McD's. Chipotle only takes longer due to the line, but they make your shit like 4 seconds.
Yeah, 5 Guys isn't super fast, but I've had a big variation on wait times (discounting a line). The one nearest my house is actually pretty quick, and if you can avoid lines you can be in and out in under 5 minutes pretty easily. The place I usually go to with friends that is farther away, we usually end up waiting longer. No idea why that is though, unless the people at one store are markedly quicker than the other.
That queue was handy. You could see what was ready and order accordingly.
The problem with those was that the product in those slides (at McDs at least) were timed at 15m iirc. When the place was busy it would cycle fast enough not to be an issue, but when it wasn't busy you'd make some stock, throw it in there, then have to throw it away if it wouldn't sell. The timing method I remember were metal "L" shaped pieces with numbers painted on them. What some people would do would be to just leave the burgers in there and keep changing the numbers, so you could end up with some dried-ass burgers if whoever was working gave no fucks.