Food in Britain in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s By Ellen Castelow , Contributing Writer | Comments Ask any American in their 50s or 60s who is the best cook he or she knows, and they will almost certainly reply, “My mom”. Ask any English person of a similar age and they will almost certainly name anyone BUT their mother. You could be kind and blame this lack of British culinary skill on rationing. Rationing continued even after the end of World War II ; indeed, when the Queen came to the throne in 1952, sugar, butter, cheese, margarine, cooking fat, bacon, meat and tea were all still rationed. Rationing did not actually finish until 1954, with sugar rationing ending in 1953 and meat rationing in 1954. Rationing and the meagre choice of ingredients and flavourings, whilst concentrating the cook’s mind on creating filling and satisfying meals, would preclude even the best of cooks from creating cordon bleu dishes.

Food was seasonal (no tomatoes in winter for example); there were no supermarkets, no frozen food or freezers to store it in and the only takeaway was from the fish and chip shop. The 1950s were the age of spam fritters (now making a comeback!), salmon sandwiches, tinned fruit with evaporated milk, fish on Fridays and ham salad for high tea every Sunday. The only way to add flavour to this bland plain cooking was with tomato ketchup or brown sauce. There were no salad dressings as we know them today. Olive oil was only sold in very small bottles from the chemist, to be warmed and placed in the ear to loosen ear wax! Salad in the summer consisted of round lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes, and the only dressing available was Heinz Salad Cream. In the winter, salad was often thinly sliced white cabbage, onions and carrots, again served with Salad Cream. Heinz also did a range of tinned salads: Potato Salad, Vegetable Salad and Coleslaw.

Sample menu for a week's meals from a 1951 cookery book 'Meat and two veg’ was the staple diet for most families in the 1950s and 1960s. The average family rarely if ever ate out. The closest most people came to eating out was in the pub. There you could get potato crisps (three flavours only - potato, plain or salted - until Golden Wonder launched ‘cheese and onion’ in 1962), a pickled egg to go on top, and perhaps a pasty or some cockles, winkles and whelks from the seafood man on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening. Things started to change when the UK’s answer to the burger bars in America arrived in the 1950s to cater for that new group of consumers, the ‘teenagers’. The first Wimpy Bars opened in 1954 selling hamburgers and milkshakes and proved extremely popular. The late 1950s and 1960s saw a rise in immigration from the former British colonies. And with them came at last…flavour!!

Although the first Chinese restaurant in London was opened in 1908, the real spread of Chinese restaurants began in the late 1950s and 1960s with the influx of migrants from Hong Kong. These proved very popular; indeed in 1958 Billy Butlin introduced chop suey and chips into his holiday camps! The 1960s also saw a dramatic rise in the number and spread of Indian restaurants in Britain, especially in London and the South East. During rationing it had been very difficult if not near impossible, to obtain the spices required for Indian cooking but with the rise in immigration from the Indian subcontinent and the end of rationing, this was no longer a problem and the restaurants flourished. So much so that in the late 1960s, the first Indian and Chinese ‘convenience foods’ became available: the famous Vesta curries and Vesta Chow Mein, the first taste for many Britons of ‘foreign food’. Also about this time a new drink in town appeared - lager. This light cold beer was the perfect partner for the new spicy food.

The late 1960s saw a boom in the British economy and a dramatic rise in the standard of living. The first package holidays to Europe started in the late 60s and made overseas travel affordable to all. This too played its part in tempting the British palate with tasty new foods and ingredients. By the late 60s and early 70s dinner parties had become very popular, featuring the new fashionable ‘foreign’ dishes like Spaghetti Bolognese, often accompanied by wine. Before the 1960s wine was only drunk by the upper classes, everyone else drank beer, stout, pale ale and port and lemon. Now Blue Nun, Chianti and Mateus Rose were the wines of choice. Many spaghetti novices spent their evenings chasing their food around the plate attempting to catch it in the fork and spoon provided, whilst trying to avoid splattering themselves with thick tomato sauce. Pre-dinner drinks were often accompanied by cubes of tinned pineapple and cheddar cheese on sticks, stuck into a melon or grapefruit to look like a hedgehog – the height of 60s sophistication!

Also at this time, chains of restaurants such as the Berni Inns began to appear in every British town and city, serving the classic 1970s favourites of Melon or Prawn Cocktail, Mixed Grill or Steak, and Black Forest Gateau or Lemon Meringue Pie for dessert. Even nightclubs began to offer food. The Tiffanys chain of nightclubs served that great 1970s snack of sausage, chicken or scampi 'in a basket' to late night revellers. The decades between 1954 and 1974 saw a dramatic turning point in British eating habits. From a nation still dealing with rationing in 1954 and whose staple diet was plain home cooking, by 1975 not only were we eating out on a regular basis, we were becoming addicted to the new spicy foods available and the nation’s love affair with Chicken Tikka Masala had well and truly begun. Burger Fool - TV Tropes Burger Fool You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share YMMV You can practically see his soul being crushed.

"I have a theory about McDonald's , that is, everything they make is all one thing, and in the back they have this big vat full of this stuff, these little molds combining, like SPLURT 'Hamburger!' SPLURT 'Malt!' SPLURT 'Paper box!' SPLURT 'Here's your change, thank you!'" — Steve Martin The fictional fast-food restaurant is a unique establishment. It's the most common first job for a TV teen, and will usually teach them a lesson about money, responsibility, or life, mere moments before they quit or are fired for odd reasons . Usually, they are spurred to employment by a specific financial need, and a failure of "The Bank of Mom and Dad" to pony up. But the fast-food joint seems to deliberately go out of its way to torture the unfortunate teenagers (and/or unlucky adults) who work there. Which includes the ridiculous outfit they are required to wear on the job — a silly hat, featuring a cartoonish version of what they serve , is almost a given, along with Happiness Is Mandatory , and this is usually enforced by a store manager who fits the Stupid Boss stereotype to a Q. Thus the fast food restaurant has the image of a Fate Worse Than Death .

Kids or teens may be threatened with working there forever if they don't finish high school , don't attend college, and/or don't do well in school . (This is, however, a Cyclic Trope ; during economic downturns, even people who "did everything right" can still find themselves working in or applying to these types of positions.) The standard foil is for the show's underdog to thrive in this environment to the total befuddlement of the "cool" characters who have been successful at everything else except this; ironically, this can have the reverse effect: after all, who would be proud of working at a fast-food joint? Wikipedia refers to these as " McJobs ". In reality, these jobs can be Truth in Television , but there's an equal chance of them being better or worse than depicted, because it depends on an individual store's quality of management and workers. The ridiculous headgear , fortunately, is universally less common than it is in fiction (a simple baseball cap, visor, or hairnet is more common). Similar workers can be found at Suck E. Cheese's . For the (not-really) "alternative", see Soul-Sucking Retail Job .

The next step up the "ladder" is working at a Kitschy-Themed Restaurant . Hey, Misery Builds Character . Examples: This TV ad for a company selling credit report monitoring tells how a guy is reduced to wearing a pirate outfit, working in a fast-food place every night singing how he is "selling chowder and iced tea" because "some hacker stole my identity." The ad tries to get people to sign up for its service "so you don't end up selling fish to tourists in T-shirts." In one commercial, a kid is getting his first paycheck from the fast food restaurant manager, who starts to wax philosophic about when he joined the work force. The kid notices that the check is exactly enough to buy the game console advertised and promptly says, "I quit!" (Too bad the kid forgot about paying for other stuff (like tax, electricity, rent, games for the console...minor stuff, you know)). Anime & Manga In the Manga version of Azumanga Daioh , Chiyo-chan and Osaka take up summer jobs at the local Magnetron Burger (a parody of McDonald's or the Japanese burger chain, MosBurger).

Osaka gets the job without any second thoughts; however, when child-prodigy Chiyo-chan claims to be in high-school, the manager assumes her family needs money, and gives her the job out of pity. Doubly funny because Chiyo's family is actually loaded. The manager even gives Chiyo all the raises, much to Osaka's chagrin, as she doesn't get any. In the first volume of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, Yugi and Jounouchi want to go out for lunch at Burger World, but Anzu tries to steer them away from it, saying that it's a terrible place to eat. Why? She works there, and doesn't want Jounouchi to blab about it to the school, because kids at Domino High School (like at some real-life Japanese high schools ) aren't allowed to hold jobs.

(Note: In the English dub of the anime, the reason for her not wanting them to talk was changed from "High school students can't hold jobs" to "I'm not old enough to work here.") Still, it was a better job than what they were afraid she was doing to make money, working as a paid escort for rich businessmen , something that, it was rumored, the other female students were doing to make money. (And yes, as far as Japan goes, this is also Truth in Television , unfortunately.) A surprisingly sympathetic example occurs in Scrapped Princess , where Pacifica and crew stop at an inn and have to sell "Soopy Buns" to earn their tab. Part of the job entails dressing up as a green Barney -like mascot named "Soopy-kun" and peddling the innkeeper's wares to customers. The innkeeper is actually nice to them, and Raquel enjoys doing the work, while Pacifica tries donning the costume and winds up scaring a little boy away when the jaw of the costume falls off. Leo takes the "Soopy-kun" job for a while when Pacifica leaves, but he gets to keep it with him when he returns to the city with Winia in a later episode.

In K-On! , Mugi is so enthralled with the local fast food restaurant that she starts working part-time behind its counter herself later on—even though she is rich and doesn't really need the money . Busou Renkin has Loteri-ya (a parody of Lotteria, a Japanese fast food chain) which the heroes and villains meet in. The staff seem fairly happy with their situation until the characters show up... in full costume. After Bravo and Papillon start eating there, it is dubbed Freak Burger. In Lucky Star , Konata tells Kagami and Tsukasa she got a part-time job, but doesn't tell them what it is until they ask the next day. A worker at a fast food restaurant is one of the jobs they imagine, but can't imagine her doing well at. At least, the "dealing with people" aspect. Burger Fool Konata: Got a problem with my smile? Muteki Kanban Musume is a Deconstructive Parody of the Fighting Series that shows the life of two Kanban Musumes (poster girls) of a the Onimaru Chinese Restaurant and the Huet Bakery in the small Hanami town Shopping District.

Their job is to attract clients to their respective business and make deliveries . They subvert this trope, being two young childish Arrogant Kung Fu Guys whose constant fighting, slacking on the job and generous quantity of Mundane Made Awesome avoid the soul crushing boring related with this trope. This is the premise of The Devil Is a Part-Timer! , where the titular demon lord, or Maou, finds himself stranded on Earth and has to eke out a living in modern day Japan while searching for a way back to his world (hopefully). His solution? Work in MgRonalds and climb through its ranks! It is, however, a rather decent place to work at, relatively speaking, especially after he becomes assistant-manager . Comic Books In the Emperor Joker story, Superboy is turned into "Superburgerboy," a mascot for a cheesy burger chain. It's worse than it sounds. Spider-Man : In Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane , Mary Jane has to work at a hippo-themed McDonald's place, which was just one in a string of cruddy jobs. In Ultimate Spider-Man , Peter works for a while at a place with a frog theme. And had to wear a frog mask at all times .

Mary Jane, for her part, puts in time at a Hot Dog On A Stick kiosk in the mall. In Foolkiller , after Kurt Gerhardt was laid off from the bank, he had to work in a fast food restaurant. In Invincible , Mark initially worked at a place like this before his superhero duties happily forced him to quit. The "Fat Boy" restaurant chain in Give Me Liberty , which wages war using giant mascot mecha for farmland to raise cattle. At one point, Wonder Woman worked at a "Taco Whiz." She took it very seriously. Feeding people is a just and dignified occupation. I don't know why you are always... dishing it. She takes almost everything seriously. The fast food chain "O'Shaughnessy's" has made multiple appearances across various DC Comics . It's been stated to be a major rival to Big Belly Burgers. In DC Comics ' Looney Tunes title, Lola Bunny works for Machu Pizza, where she specializes in delivering food to some very unusual customers: Aliens and Monsters , Fish People , gods and other mythological figures, etc.

In Prez , the protagonist starts out working a soul-destroying fast food job at the House of Corndogs before a video taken by one of her co-workers goes viral and kicks off a bizarre sequence of events that culminates in her inauguration as the first teen President of the United States. Comic Strips In this strip , Jon and Garfield order from a drive-through of a place like this, and the wise guy clerk makes a crack at Garfield's weight. (Which as you can see, he doesn't like much.) Earlier strips had Irma's Diner, a greasy spoon that offered unappealing items: the tea tastes like transmission fluid, ordering "what that guy's having" results in that guy's food being taken from him, and Irma doesn't know if she gives free refills on coffee, because no one's ever asked for a second cup before . Despite the disgusting food, Garfield and Jon frequently ate there. The Luann Comic strip featured the title character's older brother Brad working at Weenie World twice. The first time was as a teen during the 1990's while the 2nd time was during his layoff from his career as a firefighter.

Averted following his second stint when Brad was replaced by best friend T.J. As a member of the Weenie World family, T.J. managed to make her boss's life a living hell by doing everything better than she could including successfully upselling customers. Fan Works features one of these, though he's slightly more competent than your average fast-food worker. Films — Live-Action Compliance is about as dark as this trope gets. The manager at a burger place gets a call from a cop telling her that a young female worker at the store has stolen something and must be strip-searched. The manager blindly follows orders. Said worker then gets subjected to increasingly perverse sexual humiliations, all at the behest of the man on the phone, who turns out to not be a cop at all. The worst part? This has really happened. The 1980s teen movie Better Off Dead put John Cusack's character in a humiliating job at a pork-burger restaurant that required him to wear a chef's hat with attached ears and snout, even though he works in the kitchen. In Fast Times at Ridgemont High , Brad works at two fast food restaurants.

At the first one, he is fired after being forced into an argument by an overly demanding customer; at the second one, he quits in the midst of a delivery ... which he was required to make while wearing a pirate uniform. In Clerks II (and at other points in Kevin Smith's verse ) the fast food chain Mooby's fills this role admirably. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem gives Dallas' younger brother a job as a delivery boy for a pizza parlor. The characters go to great lengths to point out how demeaning and humiliating they believe this is. Coming to America features African prince Akeem and his manservant Semmi getting jobs at "MacDowell's" as part of an attempt to blend in. Akeem actually enjoys the work, but Semmi can't stand it. Scotland, PA starts off with our heroes, the McBeths, doing soul-crushing work at Duncan's Cafe. When they eventually take over the restaurant, it's shown in one brief scene that Pat McBeth really enjoys lording it over her new underlings.

West Bank Story , the 2007 Academy Award winner for Best Short Film, involves what amounts to Dueling Falafel Fools —the Kosher King and the Hummus Hut—and has the young, beautiful Hummus Hut employee (the owner's sister) fall in love with an Israeli soldier, making for a pretty little musical parable about Israeli-Palestinian Conflict . Yes. Did we mention that it's a parody/reworking of West Side Story ? In Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle , the title characters go to a location formerly a White Castle, to find that it has been turned into a rival chain. They ask the drive-thru attendant (Anthony Andersen) where a White Castle is, and he becomes so impressed by their determination that he flips out and trashes the restaurant . Inverted in American Beauty . Lester Burnham quits his white collar job as an editor so that he can work a burger counter and have the least possible amount of responsibility. It has the added benefit of pissing off his success-driven wife even more than being unemployed, especially when he catches her cheating on him at the drive-thru.

In the original Bedazzled (1967) , Dudley Moore's character is despondent over his miserable life. 28 years old, no girlfriend, lives in a dreary little basement apartment. And yes, fry cook at Wimpy's. In Loverboy , the protagonist tried to make money working in a place called Señor Pizza (which sold both pizza and Mexican food), where the worst part of the job was having to wear a fake moustache. (Which would probably have been a health code violation in Real Life .) During most of the movie, however, he ended up using the place as a front to make real money as a male escort, and a few of his friends at the place helped. The 1997 comedy film, Good Burger , which was based on the recurring sketch Nickelodeon's All That . Featuring loveable idiot Ed who loves his job as much as his brain can allow, and his snarky sidekick, Dexter, The Good Burger is the epitome of Burger Fool. As far as fast food jobs go, the employees weren't treated badly and they all seemed to like each other and Good Burger.

Their rival Mondo Burger, on the other hand, treated their employees as slaves and had a hellish boss. Musical horror comedy, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead - When a Ku Klux Klan funded military-themed fried chicken chain, The Chicken Bunker, builds a restaurant build over an ancient Indian burial ground, the chickens killed take their revenge by taking "possession" of the customers and turning them into "fowl" zombies. The restaurant is meant to be the ultimate example of Burger Fool (despite being a chicken fast-food restaurant). Includes necrophiliac chicken humping, shit-stained restrooms, skirt wearing senior male employees, masturbation in chicken grinders, delicious vats of chicken beaks and claws, cash register humping (lot of sex in here isn't there?), chicken buckets slathered with human waste and excrement, vomiting, ravenous drumsticks, acid nuggets, and the aforementioned zombie chickens. General Lee Roy: "The general has provided AMPLE accommodations for your displaced Indian dead. They have gone to a better place." [cuts to employee dumping skeletal human corpses in a common dumpster] Ian Lafferty of Sex Drive works at a bizarre, Mexican-themed donut kiosk in the mall.

Part of the job included a huge, slightly racist mascot costume. His close friends didn't hold it against him, but the punk kids at the mall would take advantage of his limited vision in the suit to stick a dildo onto the front of his costume as he wandered around. In Recess: School's Out , TJ's sister works at a burger joint. Their parents are just as proud of her getting promoted to "Assistant Fry Chef" as they are of TJ saving the world. In UHF , George and Bob are fired from "Big Edna's Burger World" after a distracted George squirts ketchup and mustard onto customers, among other screwups. Demi Lovato 's character in the Princess Protection Program , Rosie, is given a job at a Frozen Yoghurt place by the Alpha Bitch specifically to humiliate her and is sabotaged by said Alpha Bitch, but she quite rightly points out that the only person who can feel humiliation is yourself, proceeds to give the Alpha Bitch a speech and walk out with her head high.

Married to the Mob has two of these; the fried chicken joint where Angela applies for a job, and the boss turns out to be a total pervert, and the clown-themed burger place where the attempt on Tony's life takes place. In Big Daddy , Sonny Koufax ( Adam Sandler ) has venomous contempt for the restaurant chain Hooters and the people (especially the women) who work there. His friend, Kevin Gerrity (Jon Stewart), is similarly humiliated when his fiancee is forced to admit in court that her first job was as a Hooters waitress. At the end of the film, Sonny is taken to Hooters for his birthday dinner and jokes to his pals that "I'm gonna sue you assholes for making me come here." The whole thing wraps up with a Brick Joke as we see that Sonny's smug, buttoned-up ex-girlfriend is now forced to waitress there in the chain's iconic tank top and short-shorts after making an unethical career move earlier in the movie.

In Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey , the boys get into the Battle of the Bands when the woman in charge takes pity on them for working at Pretzels 'N Cheese and because she's Rufus in disguise. Since it focuses on a fictional fast food chain called Hella-Burger, the slasher film Drive Thru features a lot of these, including one played by the director of Super Size Me . Werewolf Fever, another slasher set at a fast food joint. Suburban Commando has a place called "Surfin' Burger", and the drive-thru guy is totally a Surfer Dude . Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead : After the babysitter dies and the kids lose the money their mother gave them, the oldest sister first has to take a minimum wage job in a fast food joint to support the rest of her siblings because it's the only place that will hire teenagers. It's precisely because the job is so bad with so little reward that she decides to pose as an older secretary to work at a big firm instead. Literature A Series of Unfortunate Events : The Anxious Clown, With clown-costumed waiters, balloons, and food with names like "Surprising Chicken Salad". In Audrey, Wait!

, the main character's day job is at an ice cream shoppe called Scooper Dooper. The character introduces the uniform (bright pink hat and T-shirt) and slogan (also "Scooper Dooper!") with all the affection people might give a used piece of toilet paper. The main character of Michael J. Nelson's novel Death Rat ! is at one point forced to work at "Medieval Burger," whose uniform includes a hat adorned with miniature battlements. The protagonist, like everyone else, is unable to figure out exactly how this helps the restaurant sell food. This mirrors his own experience. Its the job he had to pay the bills between stand-up shows before he was hired on to Mystery Science Theater 3000 . Eric Schlosser expounds on the plight of fast food employees in Fast Food Nation , noting that McDonald's entire plan is to make the job so simple and brainless that they can teach a new employee in 15 minutes, making any given employee totally expendable. In Good Omens , Famine opens a chain of fast food restaurants named "Burger Lord." Its employees are perky, in a soulless sort of way, except for that one guy... . Of note is the food it sells.

It's a reformulation of MEALS, Famine's line of microwave health dinners, called CHOW. Like MEALS, CHOW contains slightly fewer nutrients than the packaging they sell it in, causing the satisfied customer to die of malnutrition very rapidly, but the evil food scientists working for Famine have found a way to load CHOW with all manner of fat and sugar without increasing other nutritional content, meaning that customers essentially starve to death while growing morbidly obese. Famine finds this endlessly amusing. In Going Bovine , Cameron works at the Buddha Burger. Played straight and not at all for laughs in The Year of the Flood - not only are the pay and work conditions at Secret Burger abysmal, but the meat is implied to be at least some percentage of human meat , and the boss is a mobster who routinely rapes his female employees. Steve Chapman's "Burger Creature" is set at a nameless franchise with an overweight, greasy and perverted manager who drinks mostly-vodka screwdrivers every morning and uniforms the same color as the paper bags. One unnamed past employee quit due to "heat exhaustion aggravated by a growing fear of food." Live-Action TV In Auction Kings , Jon used to work in telemarketing.

He mentions how awful it was several times in season one. American Horror Story: Coven : One of Queenie's worst experiences was working in a cheap fried chicken place like this before she came to New Orleans. In the Season Finale , her fate when sent to Hell is serving customers there until the end of time. (She gets out eventually, along with most of the cast.) Lauren takes this job in The Catherine Tate Show and is forced to wear a squirrel mask. She gets ridiculed by her friends for working there, but naturally, she ain't bovvered . That's So Raven : Averted with The Chill Grill, Victor Baxter's restaurant. It's a popular teen hangout, and Raven and Chelsea even get jobs there, but the food is delicious and the uniforms are stylish (though that has something to do with Raven, an aspiring fashion designer, having a hand in making them). Played straight in "Food for Thought", but rather oddly, in that the greasy, sugary fast food isn't in a restaurant, but a school cafeteria.

Specifically, a company called Trans-Infinity Farms becomes the local high school's new food supplier, and offers the teens disgustingly huge portions of unhealthy food (including a yard-long hot dog, a stack of pancakes drowning in chocolate syrup, and deep-fried lettuce as a "healthy" option). In an aversion of the usual treatment of this trope, nearly everyone at the school (with the exception of Chelsea) initially loves the new menu—that is, until Raven has a vision of a Big, Fat Future in which every student develops a gigantic ass from eating nothing but junk. One of the most memorable sketches from The State , "Service with a Smile", took place at the insanely-hostile Burger Hut, where a potential customer is scared off by the cashier's screaming of orders to Carl, the Butt Monkey cook (" CHICKEN SANDWICH, CARL! "). He asks to see the manager, who threatens physical violence against the cashier for his actions, before the owner breaks down the door and trashes the entire staff. Music " Satisfaction Guaranteed " by Alyssa Reid.

Inverted in the video to Reel Big Fish 's "Sell Out," in which the band appear very fond of their jobs in a greasy spoon hamburger joint and laugh off a record executive's offer of a recording contract... until he brings out the obligatory Briefcase Full of Money . They wind up back in the greasy spoon at the end of the video. The video for Lady Gaga's "Telephone" includes a brief scene at a roadside diner. There's even a bizarre segue where Gaga teaches everyone watching how to make a sandwich. Pinballs One of the targets for the rampaging skeleton army in Bone Busters is a fast-food hamburger restaurant, complete with clown-headed drive-thru. Pro Wrestling After failing to win the WWE Championship back from Randy Orton and being harassed by Orton's hand-picked goons Cody Rhodes and Ted DiBiase in the summer of 2009, Triple H decided to get D-Generation X back together. He journeyed to Texas to find Shawn Michaels (who was in the middle of a 10-Minute Retirement from WWE at this point) only to find the "Heartbreak Kid" working as a chef in a corporate cafeteria.

Michaels at first claims that he's happy with his new job and doesn't want to return to WWE, even though his boss is a sadistic martinet and the boss's bratty prepubescent daughter takes advantage of her position as Daddy's Little Villain to constantly annoy and even abuse the employees. HBK finally decides to rejoin DX after realizing that he isn't any good at being a chef, burning his white chef's hat and kicking his boss in the face mid-tirade . Tabletop Games Old World of Darkness RPG Werewolf: The Apocalypse has the burger chain O'Tolleys as a subsidiary to the big bad corp Pentex. While many of its restaurants are relatively normal, there are also some which slip evil spirits or the other white meat in the burgers, and transform their employees into spiritually possessed freaks. All of them, however, conform to the standards laid out by this page. As the splatbooks says: In most part-time jobs, teenagers learn vital business skills, decision making and other abilities that will help them in life. While working for O'Tolleys, they learn to make burgers. Period.

In the d20 Urban Arcana setting, one of the organizations is a childrens' fast food restaurant called the Prancing Pony (the same name as a tavern located in Shadowdale in the Forgotten Realms setting, for some unexplained reason) which notes that GMs should not have its players join it (as it would offer a McJob and nothing more). Deconstructed in Unknown Armies , where the co-conspirators of Mak Attax (who to a one work at "The Scotsman") are actually part of an organization dedicated to bringing about a "magical renaissance" by unleashing small doses of magickal energy into people's food, then watching the results (and occasionally helping the victims if the results go bad). They're probably the largest, probably the least competent, and probably the most benign secret conspiracy within the setting. Despite this seeming aversion of the dullness of Burger Fool work, the game is pretty clear that not only do you still have to contend with that soul-crushing banality (which costs them conspirators) but also that the conspiracy stuff itself isn't as much fun as it sounds.

On the other hand, despite the monotony and the skepticism they get from the rest of the Occult Underground, they managed to use "the Scotsman" to pull off one of the most successful magical rituals of recent memory by aligning the "chakra points" of the American consciousness. Video Games Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has multiple ridiculous fast food restaurants. Burger Shot and Cluckin' Bell in particular both equip their employees with ridiculous headgear (at least those in Well-Stacked Pizza, another major fastfood chain, have regular caps); this seems to have had a particularly harrowing effect on Cluckin' Bell's employees. OG Loc, a friend of CJ, is assigned to Burger Shot by his parole agreement as a "hygiene technician" (aka janitor), and one early mission involves getting caught in a drive-by at a local Cluckin' Bell drive-thru (a drive-by in which Big Smoke refuses to participate, because he's too busy eating). Cluckin' Bell Employee: "Cluckety fuck.

Place your order." Cluckin' Bell Employee: "I hope you choke-a-doodle-doo!" Cluckin' Bell Employee: "If you come back, you're a moron." In Grand Theft Auto IV , we learn that Cluckin' Bell's chicken-suited mascot has a name: Cluck Norris! Apparently, he's also a martial-arts master... In No More Heroes , there's a fast food joint just outside of Travis' hotel named "Burger Suplex", which also keeps the flow of naming many landmarks after pro wrestling moves. Modern Warfare : " RAMIREZ! Secure the Burger Town!" Space Quest gives us various appearances of Monolith Burger , sporting a big yellow M to boot. In the third game you visit a franchise that has its own small space station. The fourth game has you assembling burgers via mini-game in a different franchise to acquire much-needed credits. You are guaranteed to be fired from the restaurant, being literally thrown out by the manager, once the burgers move too fast to properly assemble. In one fan remake it's possible to find a Monolith Burger behind a machine in the restaurant. Sitting at the empty booth and eating the burger will cause Roger to die by vomiting his skeleton .

The main character in Chickens of Distinction has a job standing outside the Chunky Chicken Poultry Palace in a chicken suit and making comments like "Thank you for choosing Chunky Chicken. We hope you gave it five clucks out of five." Typing "examine self" gives you the description "You're wearing a damn chicken suit. You look like an idiot." Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has Burgerninja (not actually staffed by ninja, originally; the player sort of gets in by accident), where the food is disgusting and the customers are horrible. The biggest challenge when you run the till is to keep yourself from killing the customers in a fit of rage. Eventually you end up burning the place down with a giant robot and taking your coworkers to start a pizza shop instead, which works so much better. (The food is better and your manager allows you to stab problem customers.) Undertale has the MTT-Brand Burger Emporium in Hotlands, owned and operated by showbiz-crazed robot Mettaton. The food served includes "glamburgers", hamburgers made with sequins and glitter , and a steak cut in the shape of Mettaton's face.

The cashier is a cynical, neurotic wannabe actor known as Burgerpants who is clearly tired of the forced cheeriness that comes with his position. His job had ground him down so badly he hardly reacts if you threaten him during a No Mercy run, dryly remarking "I can't go to Hell, I'm all out of vacation days." Web Animation On Homestar Runner , the fast-food restaurant "Blubb-O's", which may just consist of a non-sequitur-spouting drive-thru speaker box ("Sever your leg, please, it's the greatest day.") in the middle of nowhere. Coach Z wears a whale costume at one point, and mangles the speaker box's creepy catch phrase to make it creepier ("I'll chop off your legs!") The chain is evidently endorsed by a hip-hop artist who promotes their "Thick n' Nasty" burger. (EEEEEEEEUNGH!) Strong Bad also wears a hot-dog-shaped "sad clown" mascot costume (the "Crying Clown-Dog") at one point to advertise Bubs' Concession Stand. Strong Bad: Okay, then I quit. Bubs: Fine! But don't even think about swiping that costume!

Strong Bad: Uh, you made me buy this costume. Bubs: Oh! Pleasure doing business with you, then. Web Comics In Sinfest , Lil' Evil's job at McDebbil's. Thea's job as a wiener snack seller in Girls with Slingshots . In Kevin & Kell Lindesfarne spent a summer working at herbivore franchise McRoughage back when she still thought she was a porcupine . The worst part of the job was when ruminant customers reclaimed the cud they'd deposited earlier in the day. Bruno the Bandit has a chain called Archio's which is owned by a chaos god. Bruno once managed to successfully hold up one of their franchises by threatening to have his micro-dragon sidekick Fiona, who worked there briefly reveal what was in the secret sauce. Furry Experience : Ronnie works at a place called Gulp-N-Go, where they put the cooking grease into the coffee for that extra kick, and have everything on the menu from instant weight-gain to heart attacks. Ronnie's a fitness major, by the way. Web Original , Everyone Involved In Pizza's Preparation, Delivery, Purchase Extremely High .

Not Always Right features a lot of these. The working conditions aren't often looked down on, but they're nothing compared to the customers, who all seem to believe working in a fast food place makes you a plebian there to take your abuse. Sam & Mickey have Skipper get a job at McBurgers, a fast food restaurant with a manager who doesn't really seem to care about customers' health (French fries come in three portion sizes: Large, Extra Large, and Jumbo. The lattermost comes with 17x as many fries as an Extra Large portion, and a diabetes pamphlet of unspecified usefulness.) or work ethics (at the end, Skipper bribes the manager into letting her stay, even after her parents/"big sister and her ex" Barbie and Ken cause a scene.). Western Animation The Trope Namer is from Static Shock , and is a thin parody of "Burger King". The uniform includes a motley hat with bells. Virgil Hawkins is forced to work there by his father, who is " unaware " of the significant commitment Virgil has to his " charity work ". Dave the Intern from Sonic Boom works at one of these, implied to be the only one on the island.

Despite the fact we never see his boss, Dave never seems to get a break (figuratively and literally). Dave's years of working a minimum wage fast food job have turned him into a Big Bad Wannabe , though his complete ineptitude at it makes him a Harmless Villain , aside from maybe intentionally screwing up his customers' orders . This type of restaurant is parodied in Shrek 2 , where the Prince and Fairy Godmother go through the fly-though of the Fryar's Fat Boys, a place with a menu that includes Renaissance Wraps, Sourdough Soft Tacos, and the Medieval Meal (comes with regular or curly fries and a prize - a battle axe). Not a completely straight example of the Trope, however, as more of the humor focuses on the customers, rather than the employee, although she is dressed like a typical tavern serving maid. On Kim Possible , the pseudo-Mexican eatery "Bueno Nacho" figures heavily in the series, but the second episode has Kim and Ron move behind the counter.

Kim, usually the best at everything, fails, while Ron invents a hybrid foodstuff called the "Naco" (nacho + taco) that becomes a running gag in the series, and earns a promotion to manager. The Naco sets up another episode plot, when the BN Inc. management send Ron a royalty check for $99 million. Which was doubly hilarious in Mexico, considering what Naco means there ... The episode "Grande Size Me" brings back Bueno Nacho. Ron insists that their junk food is "healthy" and decides to eat only their meals for a month . He ends up becoming not only fat and unhealthy, but turning into a horrible monster due to a villain's latest plot requiring someone with the body chemistry of someone who's eaten nothing but Bueno Nacho food for an extended period of time . Humorously, this was the show creators' way of getting back at Disney, who forced them to do a "healthy eating" episode. The main characters of Beavis And Butthead work at Burger World, which is a fairly realistic amalgamation of the McDonald's and Burger King fast food franchises.

The usual humiliation aspect is absent, as the store is just another place for the boys to take their roughhousing and Toilet Humor such as frying up worms and throwing meat patties around. The job is still horrible, but they're just too stupid to notice. Their Manager is treated as sympathetic in that he only yells at them because they deserve it. Oddly, he doesn't ever fire them , even when their pranks once caused the health inspectors to close the store. Invader Zim put the title alien in a fast-food restaurant three times. Each of which portray fast food chains as horrible and disgusting to an absurd, terrifying degree: In "Career Day", he winds up at McMeaties, and thinks that he'll eventually be promoted to ruler of Earth. In "The Frycook What Came From All That Space", he is kidnapped and sent to the dreaded Foodcourtia, a Planet of Hats that serves the sole function of feeding aliens from elsewhere. He has to escape before the dreaded "Foodening", when a flood of customers makes it impossible to leave for twenty years due to the gravity pull (a time warp thing is involved too or something).

In "Germs", Zim's germophobic antics lead him to McMeaties again, where he discovers that the meat is germ-free. After asking an employee he discovers that the meat was NASA-developed SPAAAAAAACE MEEEEEEAT! But since they couldn't actually afford SPAAAAAAACE MEEEEEEAT , they made them out of NAPKINS . In "Invasion of the Idiot Dog Brain," GIR goes on a rampage to order food at Crazy Taco. Suffice to say, it just gets weirder from there. Even the creators have no idea what was going on in that episode. On Metalocalypse , Nathan has a nightmare that his bandmates are all killed during a show, and he ends up working at a burger joint (Dimmu Burger, named after Dimmu Borgir ) due to his never finishing high school - and he's bad at that job. SpongeBob SquarePants works at such a restaurant called the Krusty Krab, but he loves the job. (Exactly how the grill and deep fryer he uses can work, seeing as it's underwater, is never explained. ) Squidward, on the other hand, hates it with a passion. (Of course, Mr.

Krabs, who runs the place, is not only a Mean Boss , his greed often fuels the plot of an episode.) An episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force revolved around Frylock and Shake getting a job at "Slurp-a-Lunch", a restaurant which serves smoothies made from pureed meat. The characters themselves orignated in the Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode Baffler Meal, where they were the mascots of a restaurant called Burger Trench which (according to Moltar and Zorak) didn't have very good food. Schedule Slip and Executive Meddling over the supposed Spotlight-Stealing Squad nature of the Aqua Teens in the episode made it air after ATHF debuted, however. Remnants of the original script ended up evolving into Kentucky Nightmare. The waitresses in the resort restuarant in Stoked ! have to dress in pirate wench costumes. An episode of Tiny Toon Adventures had Buster and Babs working at Weenie Burger (the series' fast food parody), complete with the overbearing boss and Montana Max deciding to be the customer from Hell. "Weenie Burgers are so much fun to eat!

If you look real hard you might even find the meat!" Jeremy from Phineas and Ferb works at Slushy Dawg, where their motto is "Slushy Dawg will never get any better", unless he's working at Slushy Burger, whose motto is "Pickles so green and meat so brown, Lunchtime's fun with Slushy the Clown!" Despite all this, they're both pretty nice places and Jeremy seems happy working there. In a flashback sequence in G.I. Joe: Renegades , we learn that Duke briefly worked the drive-through of a fast food joint between high-school and the Army. Flint rubs it in when he isn't bragging about the tackle he'd landed on Duke at a football game that won his school a state championship. Subverted at the end of the scene when Flint sees Duke leaving for home on crutches; knowing the injury is his fault, he realizes he's being cruel and offers Duke a ride. Despite the kids being too young to get a job at local place Slausen's on Hey Arnold! , it doesn't mean that the joint is free of squeaky-voiced teens (voiced by Dan Castellaneta , of course).

Burgerphile in Dan Vs. . In Dan Vs Burgerphile, we learn that about 70% of Dan's diet consists of Burgerphile food. Despite the title, Dan's grudge is only limited to the Married to the Job manager who refuses to admit that he got Dan's order wrong. Notably, Dan actually likes Hortense the register girl who likes him back. The Toy Story short "Small Fry" takes place inside a fast food restaurant called Poultry Palace, which features ''Buzz Lightyear of Star Command'' Fun Meal toys (including an imposter Buzz Lightyear who was the main focus of the short and a mini Zurg toy), as with several discarded Fun Meal toys who secretly form an organization (who "accept" the real Buzz as one of their members) inside the restaurant's storage room. Taz-Mania : Taz takes a job at the Burger Thing after he quits the show in "But Is It Taz?". It includes a geriatric employee who has taken more that 20 years to make 'Employee of the Month'. Family Guy has a McDonald's Expy called McBurgertown, though the episode focuses more on the restaurant's inhumane methods of slaughtering animals.

In Steven Universe , we have Beach Citywalk Fries. Lars acts like this type of worker at the Big Donut. In "Greg The Babysitter", Vidalia gets a job at a t-shirt shop with a uniform that includes a t-shirt with a silly face on it, in order to take care of and support baby Sour Cream. In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode Stranger than Fan Fiction, a background pony running a juice bar is seen, sporting a silly hat and an expression that can cut glass. She only cracks a smile when it's evident someone's having a worse day than she is. Real Life Fast food restaurants are all over the world. In America in particular, they are a common first job for high school students due to their non-existent job skill requirements. Comedian Dane Cook has a stand-up routine about the horrors of working the drive-thru at Burger King. One of Brad Pitt 's first jobs was wearing a chicken outfit outside an El Pollo Loco. This might be referenced in Fight Club : "Sticking feathers up your butt won't make you a chicken."

Question: At which fast food chain did British teenagers first start to go out for a hamburger and a coffee in 1955 ?
Answer: WIMPEY