[Tagging] Distinction between amenity=restaurant and fast_food

[Tod Fitch]

On Aug 3, 2014, at 12:34 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:

> 
> Your comment suggests that "fast food" and "restaurant" are mutually
> exclusive; they are not.
> 
> Google finds "about 5,110,000 results" for "fast food restaurant",
> with quotes; the first of which is the Wikipedia article:
> 
>    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_food_restaurant
> 
> We should probably tag something like:
> 
>    amenity=restaurant
>    restaurant_type=fast_food
>    cuisine=pizza
> 
+1 on this, though I might go for restaurant:type=fast_food rather than restaurant_type=fast_food.

The phrase "I know it when I see it" comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it 

We have two local places where you order at a counter, and later, pick up your order from another counter. One I consider a restaurant the other I consider a fast food place. Both happen to have the same non-burger cuisine. Some of it is the atmosphere they present. And I am sure that my categorization may not suit another mapper.

Thinking about this there seems to be several items that distinguish a fast food restaurant from other restaurants in my mind:
1. Does it have a drive-through window? Yes implies fast food.
1. Are the plates and cutlery are disposable? Yes implies fast food.
2. Does the establishment has a license to sell alcoholic beverages? No implies fast food.

But there are other much more subjective criteria that people use that would be more difficult to unify into a straight forward decision tree. Since it is, in my mind, difficult to create an objective description of the difference between a fast food establishment and other food serving establishments, simply tagging amenity=restaurant with a subtype to describe the service type makes sense to me.