Zagat Rates Fast Food
August 17, 2010 at 1:52PM by Eric Burkett | Comment
What’s the best restaurant chain in the United States? While plenty of Web sites and organizations routinely wade into that particular puddle with various surveys, one of the weightier and most respected restaurant guides has just published its own list of the nation’s fast-food best: Zagat.
If you follow restaurant trends and like to keep up with the best and most innovative restaurants in the country, chances are pretty good you’re familiar with the narrow, oblong guides the company has been putting out for about the past 30 years. Stickers bearing the slogan “Zagat Rated” adorn the windows of restaurants – high-brow and low-brow but all serious about their food – in many of the country’s larger cities. But fast food? Chains? I did a double-take when I saw it but it makes sense. More people eat more food from chains; we might as well see which ones are the best at what they do.
So, which chain restaurants are top-rated according to the Zagat survey? Let’s do a little breakdown of the categories, first. Zagat divided fast-food chains into two categories: large, with less than 5,000 outlets in the United States, and mega, with more than 5,000. The survey also looked at quick-refreshment restaurants or “counter-service chains where coffee, ice cream, frozen yogurt or smoothies are the featured offering.” Finally, they rated full-service chains, or restaurants that offered full table service. Here are the results (See the complete survey here):
Most popular large fast-food chains:
1. Panera Bread
2. Chipotle
3. Five Guys
4. Chick-fil-A
5. In-N-Out Burger
Most popular mega fast-food chains:
1. Subway
2. McDonald's
3. Wendy's
4. Burger King
5. Taco Bell
Most popular quick-refreshment chains:
1. Starbucks Coffee
2. Dunkin' Donuts
3. Culver's
4. Ben & Jerry's
5. Dairy Queen
Most popular full-service chains:
1. P.F. Chang's China Bistro
2. Bonefish Grill
3. Cheesecake Factory
4. California Pizza Kitchen
5. Maggiano's
The survey included feedback from 6,518 participants who, according to Zagat’s Web site, ate an average of 6.1 meals at fast-food joints each month, and 4.6 meals per month at full-service chains. That totaled 837,000 meals eaten in chain across the country.
None of this is to say that survey participants were always crazy about what or where they were eating. Among the comments Zagat received (published, alas, without stating which restaurants they were describing) are these gems:
August 17, 2010 at 1:52PM by Eric Burkett | Comment
What’s the best restaurant chain in the United States? While plenty of Web sites and organizations routinely wade into that particular puddle with various surveys, one of the weightier and most respected restaurant guides has just published its own list of the nation’s fast-food best: Zagat.
If you follow restaurant trends and like to keep up with the best and most innovative restaurants in the country, chances are pretty good you’re familiar with the narrow, oblong guides the company has been putting out for about the past 30 years. Stickers bearing the slogan “Zagat Rated” adorn the windows of restaurants – high-brow and low-brow but all serious about their food – in many of the country’s larger cities. But fast food? Chains? I did a double-take when I saw it but it makes sense. More people eat more food from chains; we might as well see which ones are the best at what they do.
So, which chain restaurants are top-rated according to the Zagat survey? Let’s do a little breakdown of the categories, first. Zagat divided fast-food chains into two categories: large, with less than 5,000 outlets in the United States, and mega, with more than 5,000. The survey also looked at quick-refreshment restaurants or “counter-service chains where coffee, ice cream, frozen yogurt or smoothies are the featured offering.” Finally, they rated full-service chains, or restaurants that offered full table service. Here are the results (See the complete survey here):
Most popular large fast-food chains:
1. Panera Bread
2. Chipotle
3. Five Guys
4. Chick-fil-A
5. In-N-Out Burger
Most popular mega fast-food chains:
1. Subway
2. McDonald's
3. Wendy's
4. Burger King
5. Taco Bell
Most popular quick-refreshment chains:
1. Starbucks Coffee
2. Dunkin' Donuts
3. Culver's
4. Ben & Jerry's
5. Dairy Queen
Most popular full-service chains:
1. P.F. Chang's China Bistro
2. Bonefish Grill
3. Cheesecake Factory
4. California Pizza Kitchen
5. Maggiano's
The survey included feedback from 6,518 participants who, according to Zagat’s Web site, ate an average of 6.1 meals at fast-food joints each month, and 4.6 meals per month at full-service chains. That totaled 837,000 meals eaten in chain across the country.
None of this is to say that survey participants were always crazy about what or where they were eating. Among the comments Zagat received (published, alas, without stating which restaurants they were describing) are these gems:
- “Loved it when I was in high school, but I was going through my stoner phase,”
- “Amazing how one can pile so many ingredients together and still come up flavor-free,” and my favorite,
- “Ordinary is still the unattainable goal here.”
