It is a fancier version of fast food restaurants, a sit down place with beautiful interior but with a register counter where you will order your food. What exactly is a fine casual restaurant and why is it becoming a thing today?
Decent food, quick service and great ambiance; these attributes might be the ideal eating place for most people who have no time for the luxury of fine dining, not enough money for the gourmet food but still want to enjoy their eating space.
According to Luke Runyon from the Marketplace.org, this type of restaurant "borrows ideas from both fast food and upscale sit-down restaurants, catering to customers who want food fast, that's inexpensive and customized".
The success of the new wave of restaurant fad is said to have grown more quickly than fast food or fine dining restaurants because of demographics and economics. According from recorded data of NPD Group (LINK), a New York-based firm that tracks costumer spending, the state of Colorado is arguably one of the cradles of the fast casual trend. Published as a press release in their website, the state's Fort Range is the Metro-Area with the Most Fast-Casual Restaurant per Resident. Industry pioneers such as Noodles & Company and Smashburger, with the latter being a newcomer that has been the buzz for a while.
According to their analysis, this may have something to do with the demographics of Colorado, especially the people in their 30's, most especially the professionals. Because of their time-demanding jobs and different schedules, they have little time to prepare and cook meals at home. Pulling up the drive-thru is not really an option, one respondent says, "I graduated from culinary school and I eat out more than I cook at home. It's kind of a shame."
"They're looking for a full-service quality product in a McDonald's style efficiency. And that's really where fast-casual comes from," said Mitchell Roth, the CEO of Southern Concepts, the restaurant group behind Carve.
After the recession, traditional restaurants struggled, and this did not exempt the fast food chains. Perhaps these were the times fast casual restaurants had the chance to grow. Three years after 2008, fast-casual visits rose 17 percent, while other sections of the restaurant industry lagged, according to NPD.
"I think with the number of young people moving to Denver, the active lifestyle in Denver, it promotes and encourages restaurateurs to operate a certain way," Roth said.
Katie Sutton, a consultant and chef with Colorado-based consulting group Food and Drink Resources suggests the role of generations X and Y for the sudden boom. "The millennials are the ones who are really pushing this," she said. "They are eating out 6 or 7 times a week, they want groovy, they want spicy, they want bold. That's what these fast-casuals aren't afraid of. They're putting flavor into their food," she added.
