American fast food diners and drive thrus

Unlimited refills, giant drinks and drive thrus - American fast food from a British perspective.

1: In the US, your default tea option is 'sweet n' cold'

You may tease us for travelling with our own tea bags, but most British adults require a certain amount of hot tea each day to survive, and there is a serious dearth of options in most American eating establishments. If you ask for tea in an American restaurant, you'll be asked 'sweet or unsweet?' Not 'Earl Grey or Breakfast tea?'

The default tea option is cold, over ice, and it is usually so full of sugar and additives that you can't taste the tea. If you want 'hot tea' you'll likely only have one option, which may be ambiguously called something like 'British blend' and be brought out already in the cup, instead of in a tea pot. I tried unsweet tea and sweet tea, one was too bland and the other was like perfume, so I added a sachet of sugar to the unsweet tea but that made it grainy.

The quality of cold tea depended on the place - if you're visiting an actual restaurant like TFI Fridays or Ihop then sweet tea should be fine as it's usually made on site, but if you're at a fast food place like Arby's I would go for another option to avoid drinking overly-processed tea out of a giant barrel.

2. Buttered popcorn

I went to the cinema (movie theatre) while visiting friends in Florida, and instead of being offered sweet or salted popcorn, we were offered buttered popcorn, which had actual liquid butter poured over it, with a choice of powdered garlic and Parmesan seasonings that you shook on top. This blew my mind. In British cinemas, the popcorn is coated in sugar or salt and doesn't have a butter soaking. As a result it is arguably healthier, but also a lot more dry. There are no shake-on flavoured popcorn toppings in the UK either.

3. Unlimited soda refills & amazing flavours

Some of the fast food places I visited had something that Larry simply referred to as 'the machine'. It had every kind of soda flavour under the sun, including vanilla orange Fanta and vanilla orange Cherry Coke, flavours which I'm pretty sure have never existed in Britain. If you bought one cup, which was enormous, you could refill it forever. I'm not sure this is a good or healthy thing.

There were plenty of options for healthier snacks and drinks, if you knew where to look. My favourite place to get a drink on the go was Smoothie King, where you could get an energy boost or detox smoothie, even with frozen yoghurt. I should have had small though!

4. Chilli dogs and thin-sliced meat sandwiches

If you want a hot dog in the UK, your choices are with or without mustard and onions. In the US, you can get a chilli dog, with tater tots. Both come with lashings of cheese, if you want. Likewise sandwiches and burgers are much more various and intruging across the pond - even drive thrus like Sonic and chains like Arby's serve delicious thin-sliced meat on all kinds of bread. I had a smoked brisket sandwich with cheese and pickles at Arbys, and ignoring the sweet tea from the can, it was a really tasty meal.

Five Guys, another chain, regularly wins awards for the quality of their burgers and makes their fries fresh in every store - when we were in there we saw sacks and sacks of potatoes, ready to be chopped. Even Burger King is far superior in the US, where the variety and quality surprised me - I never visit it in the UK but would in the US.

5. Iced deserts

I can forgive the UK for our woeful attempt at embracing frozen yoghurt to some extent - it's kind of cold over here, and we're more likely to look for a burger or a pizza as comfort food than something that's going to make our chilly hands even frostier. However, I had the pleasure of experiencing all three kinds of frozen deserts in the US, and I would say we are far behind in this arena.

Marble slab produces amazing ice cream in all kinds of flavours, that you can have mixed together on the marble counter top by your server, while your choice of toppings get folded into the mixture and it gets dolloped into your waffle cone or chocolate-coated waffle basket with Heath bar bits or sprinkles. I had red velvet ice cream with Oreo cookie crumbles in a Heath bar & chocolate coated waffle cup. Attempting to get something like that in the UK would be very difficult, and the variety of toppings was out of this world.

We went to Pinkberry for frozen yoghurt and I was very impressed by the variety of healthy flavours and toppings - Larry chose mango frozen yoghurt with mango and strawberry slices, and little sweet rice parcels that melted on your tongue. I got salted caramel ice cream and all kinds of chocolate toppings then promptly fell into a candy coma as soon as we got in the car, sleeping for the whole ride.

We got frozen custard on the way back from New Orleans to Pensacola, in one of the few places that serves it - Shakes in Alabama. You could get shakes, scoops or 'concrete', which was so thick that it wouldn't fall out of the cup if you tipped it over! The custard was sweet and delicious - I had butterscotch topping which just made it a sugar demon's dream.

6. Drive thrus

Almost any kind of cuisine is available from a drive thru in the States, from frozen custard to chilli dogs and sushi. The convenience of a drive thru is magnified when you consider the miles that many Americans have to cross to and from work every day and when visiting relatives - the UK is much smaller and we are less likely to want to sit in our cars while eating, so it's less prevalent here. While drive thrus are convenient, I do think that they encourage people to rush through meals and make less healthy choices, Sonic, one of America's largest drive thrus, offers a huge variety of burgers and chicken, but isn't the best place to visit if you're on a health kick. We got fried chicken with milk gravy from there one day and it was pretty dry, but the chilli dogs were great.

We're going to be attempting to make authentic Southern BBQ soon when we get our new place, to see whether it's possible to properly smoke pulled pork and bake corn bread in a British oven! Until next time
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