If I were to start my own fast food business, I would make my food cheap as fuck and deliberately target locations that have:
A sixth form or university campus nearby. Students are a big market.
Nearby pubs or nightclubs. Doesn't have to be a city centre, could be a local high street. The main intent would be to target the late night crowd.
People care about speed, cost and not eating something that will give them food poisoning, not gourmet food. The luxury market is oversaturated and we have anything but the luxury to do that often.
Also, if it's a sufficiently large eat-in location like a diner, maintaining toilet facilities that don't look like they've been vandalized is important too.
It's annoying that you can either choose between having a weedy shit burger that's mostly lettuce and has to be held together with a stick, or eating a really expensive one and have to look at a load of wanker tat on the walls.
Also, you can stick your brioche buns up your arse. A brioche bun is not a load bearing bun. It dissolves in contact with moisture.
"if i pay $50,000 for this hanging piece of flare, and only stay open from 4-10pm we can siphon money from money with our money from the people who have money. But our waiter? minimum wage, cameras in the back our head chef is a wanker from out of state who pretended to be something they are clearly not, and the wine? straight from my vineyard, with minimal staff, green card only workers and an ever living hate for anything that shows compassion or empathy. that'll be $18 a glass of home wine and $38 for alfredo pasta add $8 for broccoli add $10 for chicken. what...what's wrong this is just business."
Question for the audience: what city do you most associate this style with? For me it's Seattle, because that's where I live, and ugh, it's everywhere.
And you just know that this is the type of restaurant to throw out still edible food in a dumpster and then call the cops when starving people try to take stuff from the dumpster.
Funnily enough here the prices of fast food chains have risen so sharply that the fancy hipster burger places are now priced the same or even cheaper. Like a double cheeseburger at a McDonalds is 5.50 euros but a local burger joint with burgers twice as big, filling and so much tastier are 6 euros, it's a pretty simple choice.
Don't forget the fact that despite it's just a cheeseburger, it's named "The Vonderbilt Wonder", "Halfsie Pattsies", or "Edmonton the Second". Ideally on a menu so scant on details it's hard to tell the french fries from the extra avocado.
I despise that kind of lighting because it's so fucking dim at nighttime. The places that still have physical menus apparently expect everyone to pull up their cellphones' flashlight to read it.
One place I went last year also had some boardgames, but only opened at night and only had that shit dim yellow light. Reading anything was nearly impossible and even the colors of the game pieces were blending together, "is this red, pink or orange?"
Gentrified takes on junk food with gratuitously expensive ingredients that are a slightly more subtle equivalent to just sprinkling everything with gold leaf like in 1990s Moscow or somewhere (“Our Southern-fried hog jowls come from rare heritage-breed hogs sourced from a tiny family-owned farm in the Outer Hebrides”)
I would 100% patronize a restaurant that had full transparency and decent no-frills food. They publicly post all their expenses and how much profit they make. Charge a table/dine-out fee, then actual cost of food and prep on top. Pay their workers in full, so no tipping required. Explain things like dining hours that help the business keep down costs.
I went to one of these wanky places in London and had to use my phone light to illuminate the menu sufficiently so I could see it, thanks to those shit light bulbs they insist on hanging everywhere. There are dozens of them and yet they give off no light.. wtf is the point.