Fast Food Australia and UK Compared

Last week I wrote an article called Winter in the UK and Summer in Australia Compared in which I mentioned we’d had a couple of very hot weekends lately. To cool down, we headed to the coast to catch some seabreeze.

It worked, we cooled down, but here’s another trick that works for us here when it gets very hot, I mean sticky hot. The irony of this trick is that I used to use it much more when I lived in the UK, but when the weather was cold and raining and there was nothing much else to do. It’s…

Going to a shopping mall

Ah, the air conditioning is just wonderful. The trick is to stick to the task of window shopping only, you are here to cool down, not spend money.

Yes, shopping malls in Australia or a great place to cool down.

We lived close to a couple of massive shopping malls in the UK, Lakeside and Bluewater, both indoors to protect from the rain and with some pretty good central heating for those cold winter days.

Yes, shopping malls in the UK, great place to warm up.

We’ve got some quite large shopping malls here in Brisbane as well, but I’m not going to talk about the actual shops today. If that disappoints, you can always get your shopping kicks from my post Ten Popular Retail Shops In Australia, but today I’m talking about…

Fast food

It’s been almost impossible to find a definitive top 10 fast food restaurants in Australia list and I had similar difficulty trying to pin one down for the UK.

Most lists appear to be worldwide, and all the names you would expect come to the fore:

• McDonald’s
• Subway
• Starbucks
• KFC
• Pizza Hut
• Burger King
• Taco Bell
• Domino’s Pizza
• Wendy’s
• Greggs
• Pret a Manger
• Dunkin Donuts
• Dairy Queen
• Papa John’s

It’s a bit of a mishmash of a list, being both UK and worldwide at the same time. But what do we have here in Australia?

Fast food in Australia

Not all of the above fast food chains are here in Australia. Some tried and didn’t quite make it, a couple don’t appear to have tried at all:

• Starbucks – they came, opened lots of stores, nobody liked their coffee, so they closed all their stores and went back home again.
• Taco Bell – they gave it a try as well, but a legal battle prevented them from using their name, food didn’t go down that well either, so they also packed it in.
• Wendy’s – same thing I think, gave Australia a try, didn’t work out. We do have a Wendy’s here, not the same company though, it’s hotdogs and ice cream, not burgers.
• Greggs and Pret a Manger – not seen either here, ever. We do have sandwich bars in our food courts, but sandwiches here are usually made fresh to order, not prepacked in a see-through plastic triangle. You can get those from some petrol stations.
• Dairy Queen – never seen one.
• Papa John’s – we do have some, but not many, our main pizza stores are Pizza Hut, Eagle Boys, Domino’s and Pizza Capers.

What are Australia’s top 10 fast foods?

I found an interesting article on roymorganonlinestore which has now unfortunately been removed, but this is what they said.

According to research, they say that Australia’s top 10 most popular fast food restaurants are:

1. Macdonald’s
2. Fish and Chips
3. KFC
4. Asian
5. Subway
6. Hungry Jacks
7. Domino’s Pizza
8. Red Rooster
9. Pizza Hut
10. Eagle Boys Pizza

Hungry Jacks, for those who don’t know, is actually the Australian trade name for Burger King. Red Rooster, you won’t be surprised to hear, sells chicken.

What is so different about our list though is that “Fish and Chips” and “Asian”, neither of which are brand names or chains, have found themselves in second and fourth place.

Fish and chips need no explanation but I do want to give a special mention to our Asian food, simply because it is quite spectacular. For fast food, I really don’t think it can be beaten.

Here are four fast food Asian restaurants that both myself and Mrs Bob love here in Australia:

First up is Shiki. I’ve only ever seen one of these, it’s in the fast food court in Chermside, Brisbane. Who knows, maybe that’s the only place they have? But it’s food, it’s fast, it’s cheap and the extra spicy pad Thai I had from them the other week was top class…

FantAsia, on the other hand, definitely have more than one store. They have four. It’s a family run business and they opened their first restaurant in 2010 in Brisbane city centre and have since opened three more elsewhere around this city.

Next, Hanaichi. They don’t have many outlets in Australia, 13 according to their website, but it’s Japanese fine food at fast food prices. This is Mrs Bob’s longtime favourite…

Finally, Kofoo. Short for Korean food, again, I’ve only ever seen one Kofoo fast food restaurant, but according to their website they have four. Two in Brisbane and two in Sydney. I had some kind of hot chilli prawns in fresh vegetables with rice dish, it could have been food bought in a fancy restaurant.

Yummy!

Each of the above Asian fast food restaurants sell a decent size plate of food for between $6.90 and $8.90.

What’s the point?

You may well ask “What’s the point? Why tell us about these places when there are so few of them?”

That’s just it though, there aren’t so few of them, there are thousands of them all with different names. That’s why the generic list I mentioned earlier put Asian food fourth on the list. Wherever you go, I’m sure you’ll find a fast food Asian outlet in the food court and I’ll bet the food is just great!

What’s your favourite fast food chain?