Fast casual restaurant
type of restaurant
A fast casual restaurant, found primarily in the United States, is a restaurant that does not offer full table service, but advertises higher quality food than fast-food restaurants. It is an intermediate concept between fast food and casual dining.
History
The concept originated in the United States in the early 1990s, but did not become mainstream until the late 2000s to early 2010s. During the economic recession that began in 2007, the category of fast casual dining saw increased sales to the 18–34-year-old demographic. Customers with limited discretionary spending for meals tend to choose fast casual for dining which they perceive as healthier.
Many fast casual restaurants including Cava, Chipotle Mexican Grill and Sweetgreen serve what are derisively called "slop bowls", where the meal consists of what the New York Times called a "nebulous mash of ingredients" assembled to order in a cardboard container.
Major fast casual food chains saw reduced earnings in 2025, attributed to customers reducing their spending and increased competition. Researchers noted that more consumers, particularly young ones, are making their own lunches.
Origin of the term
The founder and publisher of FastCasual.com, Paul Barron, is credited with coining the term "fast-casual" in the late 1990s. Horatio Lonsdale-Hands, former chairman and CEO of ZuZu Inc., is also credited with coining the term.
“Fast casual restaurant” enters the record as type of restaurant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fast, casual and restaurant can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2898326. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fast casual restaurant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.