I recently watched The
Founder with Michael Keaton. I enjoyed the film. It’s an interesting
character study and does a good job of telling the McDonald’s story. (I personally
think McDonald’s has lost its way, but no worries, In and Out Burger picked up
the business model and did it one better by delivering great burgers.) The
story, of course, is about the invention of fast food, the bane of the calorie
conscious the world over.
However, the concept of fast food reminded me of something I
ran across in my research for The Shopkeeper.
I wanted to make my western series different from the norm, so I focused on
miners instead of cowboys and other traditional icons of the frontier. Mine
workers start early in the morning, and I discovered they frequently ate biscuits
standing up in a saloon. This may be the
real start of fast food. (McDonalds just slapped egg, sausage, and cheese
inside the biscuit.)
Here’s how I used that tidbit of research in The Shopkeeper.
Other meals I eat for fuel, but I dawdle over breakfast—and Mary cooks a hell of a breakfast. Mary ran the restaurant across the street from my ragtag hotel. It was not a restaurant in a New York sense, but nonetheless it was the best place to eat in Pickhandle Gulch. Her small building, plank floors, and long tables were all made from unfinished lumber, but a few touches like lace curtains had softened the rough appearance. Breakfast for miners usually consisted of biscuits eaten standing up in some stale-smelling saloon. Not fancy, but quick. They needed to get to work. Mary catered to the mine owners, town merchants, and people like myself, who had the time and money to eat a slow, hearty breakfast.
As I entered her tidy café, the aroma pulled the trigger on my appetite. I took my usual seat at a table by the window, and Mary sauntered over with a cup of black coffee that suspended its own little cloud of steam above the rim.
“What’ll ya have today, Mr. Dancy?”
“Everything.”
“Everything it is—over easy, crispy, and soaked in grease.”
“You got it,” I said.
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| Risk taker, Rule Breaker, Game Changer |