Zagat Survey recently released its 2006 America's Top Restaurants guide. The book covers 1,352 eateries in 41 cities nationwide, rating and reviewing the most significant eateries in each city. This fast casual dining restaurant survey includes a great variety of comparative data regarding meal costs, tipping, favorite cuisines, customer complaints, frequency of dining out and much more. It also points to a variety of national fast casual dining trends and issues.
Among the key fast casual trends this year is the rise of Japanese food while at the same time, fine Chinese dining, once the leading Asian cuisine in the U.S., seems to have stalled. Other trends included; service ratings that lag behind almost everywhere in the fast casual industry by almost two points, and on the whole meals are 3% more expensive than they were a year ago.
