World's Top Fast-Food Restaurants

Star chefs are ditching foie gras and foam for tacos and French fries. From Los Angeles to Lyon, here’s where to sample their delicious cheap eats.

Who liked potato chips in their sandwiches as a kid? Superstar chef Bobby Flay, that’s who. At Flay’s latest venture, Bobby’s Burger Palace, the award-winning chef is recapturing his youth and crumbling potato chips onto all-Angus beef patties for a crunchy surprise. (An April tweet of his even advised: “Have a L.A. burger, and ask to have it CRUNCHIFIED!”)

“Now that I’ve gotten to this point in my career, I can do the thing I crave the most—which is a cheeseburger, fries and a shake,” he told Newsday in July 2008, on the eve of opening his first location, in Lake Grove, Long Island. Not surprisingly, the “house” pick at Bobby’s Burger Palace is the Crunchburger.

Forget KFC’s new grilled chicken and Baskin-Robbins’s “healthy” ice cream: the real news in fast food is around dishes spun from the unique visions—and tastes—of the world’s top chefs.

The Fast Food: Global Industry Guide forecasts the global fast-food market will reach $130 billion by 2012, a number that hasn’t gone unnoticed by some of the world’s great chef-entrepreneurs seeking to leave their culinary mark—and cash in—on the ever-ballooning trend of “fast casual” dining.

Over the past decade, a number of star chef–created fast-food restaurants have opened to great fanfare, with several debuting in the past year alone. Chefs like Hollywood culinary darling Wolfgang Puck, British Michelin-star collector Heston Blumenthal, and Spanish molecular gastronomist Ferran Adrià have crossed the culinary stratum to make their brand of cooking more accessible at high-concept in-and-out restaurants where dishes rarely cost more than $10.

It was in the 1970s in New York City that the internationally renowned French chef Paul Bocuse first discovered the allure of the McDonald’s Egg McMuffin and its famous fries. “These are the best French fries I have ever eaten. I want to meet the chef,” he told his translator Colette Rossant, who recounts the story in her 2006 book, The World in My Kitchen. In 2008, some 30 years later, Bocuse, at the age of 82, opened his own fast-food restaurant, Ouest Express, in Lyon, France.

It’s tough to deny the guilty caloric pleasure of a juicy, three-napkin burger, refuse a plate of golden, perfectly crisped fries, or pass up a coffee milkshake on a steamy summer afternoon. Take New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer (who created Gramercy Tavern and other top-rated fine restaurants): he threw carb counts to the wind when he conceived Shake Shack. Though it began life as a mere hot dog cart, the Madison Square Park kiosk has emerged as the burger joint of choice for many New Yorkers, many of whom are willing to wait in long lines for a single ShackBurger or “hand-spun” custard shake.