CITY LIFE MAGAZINE

          DINING OUT

Fast food follies

Just because you have to eat fast doesn’t mean you have to eat poorly

By LENADAMS DORRIS

Despite the imminent turn of the millennium, everybody still seems to be working too long and living too fast. According to popular culture, we were supposed to have figured out by now. Never again would we have to eat out, as our personal robots shopped, cooked and served us gourmet meals every day. And closer to reality, the paperless office and home office commuting were supposed to give us the leisure time to enjoy life. All of this would spell the end of fast food, of course, but alas, it simply has not come to pass.

The big fast food chains are as viable as ever, serving ever-less food value with ever-less efficiency. The local crush for service employees (brought about by the opening of hotel after hotel) has left the burger joints woefully staffed with no relief in sight. Despite the promises of a bright tomorrow that were to have come true by now, we are still stuck in high gear, and feeding ourselves on the run is the daily fate of many.

If you have any sense of taste, however, you can only eat at the big five fast food joints once or twice a year without making yourself at least vaguely ill (even if it tastes good, we know that all that grease and salt is bad bad bad…). And while the big five have destroyed almost every shred of competition, especially in this chain-store heaven called Vegas, there are still a handful of independent or small-chain fast food joints around that can give you a choice when it comes to lunch the run.

This is a real, honest-to-goodness hot dog stand with all the trimmings, including chili, hot beef and hot sausage sandwiches, big soggy fries and all the rest. If you yearn for the corner dog stands of your youth in the great East, check out this strangely located joint housed in an old A&W root beer stand about a mile of U.S. 95 on Rancho (on the right hand side). This food is not healthy for the body, but for some people under some circumstances, it’s just what the doctor ordered for the soul.

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