> ...more places where you order at a register and bus your own food with minimal overheard and maximum investment in the quality of the food rather than the whole waiter and ambiance schtick.This is currently a cultural non-starter except for niche markets, but once an economic crisis of sufficiently large and long duration is established, that model might work. Maybe. Look up any number of formerly-wealthy-now-poor nations, and I'm hard-pressed to recall any that adopted this model in the mainstream restaurant industry in that nation. Human culture changes are slow to arrive, and carry immense inertia.
I suspect the hyper-rationalization of markets is leading to continuous spectrum K-selection strategies that ultimately prove adverse to the overall market. All the monetization optimization (aided by the gradual incremental gains our industry delivers, however somnambulantly) is attaching a price to every factor that is priced, but under-pricing all non-priced factors (generally those on a long timeline like sustained incentives for young families to support future demographics, pollution, energy, etc.).
This optimization is blunted by currently-stronger cultural norms, especially those tangential or central to mating. It remains to be seen which force remains stronger over the long run (my personal bet is on the cultural norms).
Having said all that, I wouldn't mind at all patronizing a "meal plan" model-based co-op that lets me select 2-4 months in advance how many breakfast/lunch/dinner/brunch I want for a month, in a setting like you describe, a 1-3 minute walk from where I live, with online seating reservations, that operates 24x7x365, serving the locality's "home style" cuisine plus lots of greens. The business only lets in a dynamically-selected number of walk-ins, based upon seating availability and ML-projected food waste at that moment. The value proposition is trade off the customer-skin-in-the-game, fixed commitments for fresh ingredients freshly-prepared at near-home-prepared prices, with aggressively-amortized costs of running the co-op and its costs, thus able to pay fair wages for bare bones staff.
But I would be very surprised if there are enough potential customers like me in sufficient densities in even major metropolitan urban cores to make such a model feasible.