A fast food restaurant, sometimes known as a quick service restaurant or QSR, is a specific type of restaurant characterized both by its fast food cuisine and by minimal table service. Food served in fast food restaurants typically caters to a Western-style diet; is cooked in bulk in advance and kept hot to order; and is usually available ready to take away, though seating is provided. Fast food restaurants are usually part of a restaurant chain or franchise operation, which ships standardized foodstuffs to each restaurant from central locations.The first fast food restaurants originated in the United States of America during the 1950s. Today, American-founded fast food chains such as McDonald's and Pizza Hut are multinational corporations with outlets across the globe.Variations on the fast food restaurant concept include fast casual restaurants and catering trucks. Fast casual restaurants have higher sit-in ratios, and customers can sit and have their orders brought to them. Catering trucks often park just outside worksites and are popular with factory workers.

On January 10, 2008, international restaurant chain Pizza Hut, Inc filed to protect the trademark Pasta Hut in relation to "restaurant services". This is the company’s first trademark application for this name, as well as the first indication that Pizza Hut is considering opening restaurants using the Pasta Hut brand name. (Trademork Exclusive)

As more Americans seek out products with green credentials, more quick and casual restaurants are ready to serve them. Eating green no longer means just ordering from a vegetarian menu. In fact, it doesn't even have to mean eating healthy.

The closed-circuit television camera lurking just down the street from the fast-food restaurant bellows menacingly at the first sign of danger to the flora, or a cast-off cigarette butt or fast-food wrapper, for that matter. "Pick it up," commands a booming voice from . . . where, exactly?

Two Columbus, Ohio, fast-food restaurants have been sued over an alleged 'free food' scheme to get Ohio State University students to sign up for credit cards. Ohio Attorney Gen. Marc Dann said Potbelly Sandwich Works and La Bamba Mexican Restaurants Group offered students free sandwiches and burritos but, first, they would have to

No more trans fats with those french fries? No problem. The city's ballyhooed ban on trans fat cooking oils in all New York restaurants — an idea that gave chefs indigestion when first proposed — seems to be going surprisingly smoothly. Across the city, most fast food chains say they've already made the switch days before the July 1 deadline, which